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A Roundtable on Minority
Lawyers
"WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY,
AND HE IS US" Pogo
As more and more minority and
ethnic lawyers enter the mix, we are seeing more and more images
of such lawyers in popular culture. Movies and television have
for the most part failed to identify such lawyers (with the notable
exception of woman laywers) as marginalized, or apart from the
American mainstream. The notion that lawyers might carry remnants
of their ethnic or minority past with them was alien, just as
the notion that white male Anglo-American lawyers were considered
the norm was never articulated. As minorities in general became
more visible in popular culture so too did minority professionals:
physicians, nurses, teachers, dentists, politicians---and lawyers.
Thus began the examination
of the minority or ethnic lawyer as both a product of her culture
and a product of the law school and legal system. What did and
what do ethnic and minority lawyers bring to the practice and
interpretation of law? How are they perceived by the mainstream
popular culture? Do the traditional views of the legal system
(the law as game, for example) hold true in popular culture representations
of the minority and ethnic attorney? Has she been co-opted, is
she a mole within the legal system, working for justice, or is
she completely ineffectual?
In any case, in popular culture's
estimation is the lawyer herself ever truly an integrated member
of society, or are lawyers part of an "alien nation"?
Do legal language, legal training and legal ways of thinking
inevitably separate the lawyer from the lawyered? Are African
American lawyers alienated both by racial identify and by cultural
norms from the accepted "lawyerly mainstream"? Can
Native American lawyers ever reconcile white man's law practice
with the independent legal system of the reservation? Are non-Anglo-American,
non-white lawyers at a disadvantage when trying to reconcile
Western and non-Western notions of justice? Current television
shows that examine at least some of these issues with regard
to the non-white and/or non-male U.S. lawyer include Girlfriends,
Any Day Now, Soul Food, and the upcoming Queens
Supreme (slated for a PJ roundtable) and A.U.S.A.
This roundtable suggests that
more serious study is needed regarding some of the individual
and group representations of ethnic and minority lawyers. Counter-intuitively,
in pop culture they are legion and include Native American lawyers,
Hindu lawyers, African-American male and female lawyers, non-white
judges, and the truly alien lawyer, the attorney in science fiction.
Christine Corcos
Posted January, 2003
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