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Instead of the conventional idea that lawyers are all slimebags, we instead see in movies like Young Mr. Lincoln a more favorable image of the lawyer and a less favorable image of the law. Usually we have a noble lawyer fighting to find justice within a corrupt system of law.


Feature article

Tricky Abe

by John Denvir

As Presidents' day approaches, maybe we can use film to get a new perspective on Abraham Lincoln's view of law. We all know that Nixon earned his nickname "Tricky Dick," but maybe the same adjective could be applied to another lawyer president, Abraham Lincoln, at least as he is portrayed in John Ford's classic Young Mr. Lincoln.

Ford's movie portrays a Lincoln ambivalent towards law, sometimes almost contemptuous of its sonorous banalities. For instance, our first sight of him practicing law involves dispute about a small amount of money. Abe first structures a settlement that would not require litigation and then playfully, but meaningfully, threatens both parties with physical violence if they do not agree to the deal.

We next see him as the judge of the pie contest at the county fair. Here Ford allows Lincoln to put on a burlesque of judging. First, he tastes the peach pie and likes it; then he tastes the apple pie and thinks he likes that even more, but then he feels it his duty as judge to give the peach pie one more taste, and on it goes. I think here we can see three messages. First, the judge doesn't want the contest to end before he's had his fill of the evidence. Secondly, the whole idea of judging as choosing one side of the argument as totally "right" is silly. And Ford is also showing us that the law often forces citizens to make impossible decisions. In the movie, for instance, the mother of Lincoln's clients is required by the law to choose which of her two sons she will see executed.

Soon thereafter, we see Lincoln once again impishly fiddling with the rules. Here he is on the weaker side of a "tug 'o war" at the fair; he cleverly rescues victory from defeat by hitching his side's end of the rope to a passing wagon heading in the opposite direction.

Of course, the central scene in the movie is Lincoln's famous cross-examination of a hostile witness in which he uses the Farmer's Almanac to show that moon was dark at the time the witness said its brightness allowed him to identify Lincoln's client. This, of course, is an example of admirable lawyerly trickery. But once he has destroyed the credibility of the witness, Lincoln goes on to bully him in the best Perry Mason fashion to confess to the murder. Substantive justice is done, but little attention is paid to the niceties of legal procedure.

Within the structure of Young Mr. Lincoln it turns out that the hero must save society from two evils. One is the evil of mob violence that presents itself in the form of a lynch mob screaming for blood. This scene, which anticipates the stand against the mob of another lawyer, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, is usually interpreted as a paean to the rule of law, but actually, it's not law, but the Abe's courage to face down the mob which is the operative moral force. The second evil is the law of homicide that requires the execution of both sons with little concern that at best only one of them committed the murder. Once again it's the lawyer who saves the day for justice.

Of course, it's not too surprising that Ford should show Abraham Lincoln as a hero, lawyer or not. But when we think about it, the structure of Young Mr. Lincoln is the structure of most trial movies. Instead of the conventional idea that lawyers are all slimebags, we instead see in movies like Young Mr. Lincoln a more favorable image of the lawyer and a less favorable image of the law. Usually we have a noble lawyer fighting to find justice within a corrupt system of law.

Maybe the layman movie audience sees a social reality that lawyers themselves too often miss. Most people don't experience law as a rational system of rules aiming towards justice, but as the unpredictable exercise of arbitrary state power. They like lawyers best when we stand with them against the law in hope of justice.

Posted February 19, 2003

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