Ranking the Top Legal Films: Better Last Time

Let me state upfront that my relationship with the ABA has been ueven, They do very credible work on behalf of the legal profession. My Dad was a life-long member and was proud of it. I joined the ABA first thing after I passed the bar and remained a member for 10 years. After that time, I decided that what I received from my membership was a subscription to the ABA Journal and the ability to attend ABA functions at a discount, and the cost was still very high for a solo practioner. When the editor of the journal left, I applied for the position, was interviewed, and not hired, the position going to attorney who had a position in a state ABA organization. When the editor job soon opened up again, I applied again, and I was told I wouldn't be considered because I had been rejected before. I gave up my membership because I felt it was just too expensive and had too little direct benefit for a solo practioner. But that could be just me. Still, about seven years ago I volunteered as a member of a committee of a state bar association of which I am a member to participate in an intellectual property session at the ABA convention to be held in Washington, D.C.. I said yes, prepared for it, but then we were told our session had been jettisoned. The next year, the ABA convention was in Chicago, and we were asked if we were still interested in doing the panel. We all said yes, although it now involved the costs of a trip to Chicago and a hotel room. We didn't get any information on registration, and, when I inquired, an ABA representative told me convention panelists were required to pay registration fees but would receive a discount. I emailed the other panelists that the discounted registration would still cost about $500, and all of us decided we had to withdraw because our individual costs including travel and hotel and registration fee would be over $1,500, not a lot for a big law firm but a great deal for a solo practitioner. The ABA representative was not happy.

The 2008 ABA list included such films as To Kill a Mockingbird, A Man for All Season, Anatomy of a Murder, Philadelphia, Witness for the Prosecution, Young Mr. Lincoln, Compulsion, 12 Angry Men,  Breaker Morant, And Justice for All, Erin Brockovich, The Verdict, Presumed Innocent, My Cousin Vinnie, Judgment at Nuremberg, A Few Good Men, Kramer Vs Kramer, Reversal of Fortune, In the Name of the Father, Inherit the Wind, A Civil Action, and Amistad, all very credible films about historical or fictional legal cases.  My Cousin Vinnie was also included, which is the favorite legal film, albeit a comic one, of many attorneys I know. On the 2008 list as well was The Paper Chase, which is about a fictional law school. The only two from the 2008 list that I would question are Miracle on 34th Street and Chicago; both are very good films that end with court cases, but Christmas and the songs, respectively, overwhelm the legal content.

The 2018 list adds the more recent Spotlight, Marshall, Loving, The Post, The Lincoln Lawyer, RBG [a documentary on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg] and Michael Clayton. The new list also includes movies that were around when the 2008 list was created: Criminal Court (1946), Adam's Rib (1949), Primal Fear (1996), and  Legally Blonde (2001). The ABA could conceivably have expanded the list size but instead the judges did not include the following films on the top 25 that had been on the 2008 list: Witness for the Prosecution, Compulsion, Philadelphia, Breaker Morant, And Justice for All, Presumed Innocent, Reversal of Fortune, Amistad, Chicago, A Miracle on 34th Street  and In the Name of the Father. Four of those removed from the top 25 were included in a separate and rather broad list of "other great legal films": Witness for the Prosecution, Breaker Morant, Presumed Innocent, and Philadelphia.

One can assume that some of the films were added to the new list because of their newness, while some of those deleted--Presumed Innocent, In the Name of the Father, Reversal of Fortune, And Justice for All, Breaker Morant--may have seemed older but not "classic" like To Kill a Mockingbird. Some deletions and additions could reflect different tastes between the two sets of judges. We will not know until the ABA's 2028 list whether Spotlight, Marshall, Loving, The Post, The Lincoln Lawyer, and RBG have endured. Some of the additions are very odd. Even though Legally Blonde inspired an unucessful Broadway musical, this fklm about a young woman who pursues her boyfriend when he goes to Harvard Law and becomes a lawyer herself seems dated in 2018. RBG is the only non-fiction film in both bunches and is only a year old. Criminal Court is an obscure 62-minute, 72-year old film about a criminal attorney who kills a gangster, covers up the crime, and then ends up defending his girlfriend friend for the murder. It plays like a mediocre Perry Mason episode, that is if Perry had committed murder. None of the additions, to my tastes, measure up to some of the deleted ones: Witness for the Prosecution, Compulsion, Philadelphia or Amistad, both in the quality of the filmmaking and in what they tell us of law and the legal system..

The best films are some of those that survived both lists: To Kill a Mockingbird, A Man for All Season, Anatomy of a Murder, Young Mr. Lincoln,  12 Angry Men,  Judgment at Nuremberg, A Few Good Men, Inherit the Wind, and even My Cousin Vinnie. The attorneys use courage and ingenuity to defend the defenseless and are heroes, even when they lose. And for the record, five of the  attorneys in the nine films are solo practioners.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino