Abstract
If you see a beautiful young woman in a snappy business suit on your television set, chances are she is a lawyer. Since L.A. Law’s debut in 1986, countless shows—both with legal themes and otherwise—have featured women lawyers as significant characters, with more arriving every season. This trend is not new; popular culture has long been fascinated with the image of the female attorney. From Shakespeare’s Portia to the 2006 midseason premiere of Courting Alex, the female lawyer has appeared in countless films, plays, novels, and television series.1 Academics and critics interested in popular culture have noticed her and devoted many articles and even books to her.2 With this chapter, we add to this lively discussion a study of brilliance in television’s women lawyers. Intelligence in these characters echoes society’s understanding of “smartness” in real women lawyers. However, the intelligence of television’s female lawyers occurs amid many unrealistic contextual factors and gives a distorted image of women in the profession. Television shows us beautiful, brainy female lawyers who can display their smartness by practicing in any area they like and in any manner they like, but whose intelligence is undercut by an inability to have successful personal relationships. Real women attorneys often do not have beauty to accompany their brilliance, have been traditionally relegated to showing their intellectual abilities in particular areas and through particular methods of lawyering, and are sometimes married and have children. The disparity between the popular culture picture of female attorneys and real women lawyers suggests much about how U.S. society conceptualizes brilliance.
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Notes
For example, see Cynthia Lucia, Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)
Stacey Caplow, “Still in the Dark: Disappointing Images of Women Lawyers in the Movies,” Women’s Rights Law Reporter 20, no. 2/3 (1999): 55.
Michael Asimow, “Embodiment of Evil: Law Firms in the Movies,” UCLA Law Review 48 (2000): 1339.
Hannah Dugan, “Does Gender Still Matter in the Legal Profession?” Wisconsin Lawyer 75 (2002): 10.
Rebecca Korzec, “Working on the ‘Mommy-Track’: Motherhood and Women Lawyers,” Hastings Women s Law Journal 8 (1997): 117.
Marjorie Kornhauser, “Rooms of Their Own: An Empirical Study of Occupational Segregation by Gender among Law Professors,” University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 73.2 (2004): 293.
Carole Shapiro, “Women Lawyers in Celluloid: Why Hollywood Skirts the Truth,” University of Toledo Law Review 25 (1994): 955.
For a study of eating disorders in female attorneys, see Julie E. Buchwald, “Confronting a Hazard: Do Eating Disorders Plague Women in the Legal Profession?” Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies 9.1 (1999): 101.
Stephen Gillers, “Taking L.A. Law More Seriously,” Yale Law Journal 98 (1989): 1607.
See, for example, Lisa Scottoline, “Get Off the Screen,” Nova Law Review 24 (1999): 655.
See Ric Sheffield, “On Film: A Social History of Women Lawyers in Popular Culture, 1930–1990,” Loyola L.A. Entertainment Law Journal 14 (1993–1994): 73–111
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1982).
Deborah L. Rhode, “Perspective on Professional Women,” Stanford Law Review 40 (1988): 1163.
Naomi Mezey and Mark C. Niles, in “Screening the Law: Ideology and Law in American Popular Culture,” Columbia Journal of Law and Arts 28 (2005): 91
See Christine Alice Corcos, “‘We Don’t Want Advantages’: The Woman Lawyer Hero and Her Quest for Power in Popular Culture,” Syracuse Law Review 53 (2003): 1225
J. G. Marek. “The Practice and Ally McBeal: A New Image for Women Lawyers on Television?” Journal of American Culture 22.1 (1999): 77.
Carole Shapiro, “Women Lawyers in Celluloid, Rewrapped,” Vermont Law Review 23 (1998–1999): 304.
Carolyn Lisa Miller, “ ‘What a Waste. Beautiful, Sexy Gal. Hell of a Lawyer.’ Film and the Female Attorney,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 4 (1994): 203.
Diane Klein, “Ally McBeal and Her Sisters: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Representations of Women Lawyers in Prime Time Television,” Loyola L.A. Entertainment Law Journal 18 (1997–1998): 259.
David Papke, “Cautionary Tales: The Woman as Lawyer in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema,” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 25.3 (2003): 485
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© 2007 Sherrie A. Inness
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Sutherland, S., Swan, S. (2007). Raising the Bar: Brilliant Women Lawyers from Ann Kelsey to Miranda Hobbes. In: Inness, S.A. (eds) Geek Chic: Smart Women in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08421-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08421-7_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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