When Law Goes POP

Three Important Points:

1)In chapter 1, Sherwin makes the point that "law is everywhere" (10). This might seem obvious, but I think that it help sets up the book, so that the reader is focused not only on law and it's fictional aspects, but also on the influence of law on our daily lives.

2)In chapter 2, Sherwin connects the idea that law is apparent in our daily lives, with the fact that visual mass media has an even stronger influence on our daily lives. Because of this, “law is not only collapsing into the popular, it is collapsing into an increasingly popular form of cultural postmodernism” (37). Therefore, lawyers increasingly have to tailor the content of their arguments to the medium that is most common to the jurors, visual mass media, in order to gain control over the reality of their cases.

3)In chapter 3, Sherwin gives a number of real-life examples of legal storytelling, showing that “truth is not easily divorced from fiction” in law, and that often times the truth is constructed at trial through a story, in order to connect the reality of the facts to the feelings (such as sympathy or antipathy) of the jurors towards the person on trial.

Discussion:

Honestly, I agree with each of the points that I picked up from the first three chapters of this book. Our society is so ingrained in the mass media, that it would be senseless not to believe that it has an effect on our justice system. But, I also think that in some situations, legal storytelling may not be as effective at finding the real truth, and may lead some juries to make the incorrect decision.