Law and film. Useful combination in teaching law?

Keywords: lawyer movies, professional ethics, dilemma, reflection of law and lawyers in society, law teaching

Abstract: This article deals with legal movies and especially with their subsection of lawyer movies, their possible usage in law teaching at law schools and reasons for using lawyer movies at law schools. Today, movies about lawyers are one of the best means of engaging students in discussions about the importance of legal ethics. By storytelling, they bring important issues into the classroom through ways an abstract teaching is unable to do. Common knowledge of recent movies among the young generation enables teachers to demonstrate their points through examples to which students can relate. They can also uniquely emotionally touch students and thus create teachable moments otherwise absent in classrooms. The next part of this article is dedicated to the different styles of usage of lawyer movies, mainly in a special course at law schools. Experience from the Prague Law School, Charles University, and several universities in the United States of America are examined and are used to discuss different approaches to teaching with lawyer movies. The article thus suggests several ways of organizing a special course using lawyer movies at a law school. Furthermore, the authors offer twelve movies, which according to their experience work well in seminars.