Copyright © 2001 Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture All rights reserved. ISSN 1070-8286 Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 8(1) (2001) 48-57 A LAW CULTURE DIAGNOSTIC * by James R. Elkins West Virginia University Review of When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture Author: Richard K. Sherwin Publisher: University of Chicago Press Date: 2000 A LAW CULTURE DIAGNOSTIC It has become increasingly clear that law is no longer (if it was ever) an autonomous discipline. In the past 25 years, law has been theorized and re-positioned from disciplinary perspectives as divergent as economics and literary criticism, socio-biology and rhetoric, critical theory and religion. Richard Sherwin’s When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture follows in this tradition, exploring law from a broad contextual/social/ political perspective. Sherwin’s proclaimed interest is popular culture, but he writes as a cultural diagnostician exploring some difficult questions: What happens when the stiff formality of law and the social institutions that preserve law’s stability and legitimacy are subjected to the powerful influences of today’s new visual mass media and its focus on images, associative reasoning, spontaneity, and the shaping (and deforming) of our stock of cultural stories? More particularly, what happens as lawyers – Richard Sherwin in When Law Goes Pop refers to them throughout the book as "savvy lawyers" – use the power of media visual images and stories (the production of which is market driven) to shape the outcome of courtroom litigation to benefit their clients? Is law and our meaningful understanding of it, endangered or enlightened by the influence of popular culture? These are the questions Richard Sherwin, Professor of Law at New York Law School, addresses in a masterful, exhilarating, sometimes frustrating account of the influences of popular culture on law and courtroom litigation. The reader should be forewarned – Sherwin doesn’t present a systematic theory of how law undergoes cultural change, nor is he tempted by the academic’s propensity to lay out definitions and then shoehorn observations to fit. For example, Sherwin simply ignores on-going efforts to distinguish (or erase) distinctions between "high culture" and "popular culture." Some academics and theorists will be disappointed in the way Sherwin ignores what they take to be preliminary and basic. Still other readers will object to the absence of empirical research findings; Sherwin doesn’t Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture