Introduction

A cavalcade of American films over the last fifteen years has addressed legal challenges by lawyers representing ordinary citizens who have been harmed by products or practices of large private corporations. The types of legal actions featured in these films are very much like one familiar form of public interest litigation that we ordinarily associate with cause lawyering. According to some critical observers, these films reflect a strong liberal and pro-lawyer bias. These films, we are told, portray modern mass corporations and other large entities as lawless symbionts driven by the amoral and immoral pursuit of profits and awash in reckless and unaccountable perfidies. At the same time, these films purportedly portray the “trial lawyer as (the) hero” who most successfully challenges the corporation, its unlawful practices, or its owners. In this common reading, contemporary films offer simplistic narratives celebrating left-wing cause lawyering on behalf of victimized American consumers and workers.

Such “good press” for cause lawyers would, if plausible, be a novel development in U.S. cultural history.