"When Law Goes Pop" is an examination of legal practice in today's world, one that should be needed by everyone concerned with the future of our legal system and the meaning we invest in it.

Scholars, educators, health professionals, and activists from a variety of fields have struggled with one of the most significant questions of contemporary life: How do we rescue the experience of death and dying from the mire of fear, denial, and secrecy that it has been associated with for the better part of a century? In When Death Goes Pop, Charlton D. McIlwain describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent forms of media as television - a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death and dying from the private sphere to the public. The book surveys the past thirty years of death-related television programming, from daytime soaps to prime-time dramas, focusing primarily on Home Box Office's Six Feet Under and its innovative approach to the subject, and from the Sci-Fi Channel's Crossing Over to the genre of paranormal programming as a whole. This book also discusses the increasing use of multimedia and the Internet in the funeral industry and how the new technologies change the way that we remember the dead as they create and sustain what we might call a «virtual community of death».

The dramatic growth of the Japanese economy in the postwar period, and its meltdown in the 1990s, has attracted sustained interest in the power dynamics underlying the management of Japanês administrative state. Scholars and commentators have long deba

In this book questions about definitions and demarcations of sport science are discussed. Not the least the many normative ideas of sport as good or as bad are problematized in relation to the academic field. These ideas permeate sport science in ways that are not seen in other academic fields like history, sociology or law. In addition, if and if so, in what ways sport science influence social science in general. Does sport science bring new questions in relation to issues like "what makes a society possible" or "what is a human being"? This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Applying innovative interpretive strategies drawn from cultural studies, this book considers the perennial question of law and politics: what role do the founding fathers play in legitimizing contemporary judicial review? Susan Burgess uses narrative analysis, popular culture, parody, and queer theory to better understand and to reconstitute the traditional relationship between fatherhood and judicial review. Unlike traditional, top-down public law analyses that focus on elite decision making by courts, legislatures, or executives, this volume explores the representation of law and legitimacy in various sites of popular culture. To this end, soap operas, romance novels, tabloid newspapers, reality television, and coming out narratives provide alternative ways to understand the relationship between paternal power and law from the bottom up. In this manner, constitutional discourse can begin to be transformed from a dreary parsing of scholarly and juristic argot into a vibrant discussion with points of access and understanding for all.

“Citizenship is salvation,” preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali’s message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all Americans through rights guaranteed by the law and correct the unjust implementation of law that prevailed in the racially segregated United States. Ali and his followers took on this mission of citizenship as a religious calling, working to carve out a place for themselves in American democracy and to bring about a society that lived up to what they considered the sacred purpose of the law. In The Aliites, Spencer Dew traces the history and impact of Ali’s radical fusion of law and faith. Dew uncovers the influence of Ali’s teachings, including the many movements they inspired. As Dew shows, Ali’s teachings demonstrate an implicit yet critical component of the American approach to law: that it should express our highest ideals for society, even if it is rarely perfect in practice. Examining this robustly creative yet largely overlooked lineage of African American religious thought, Dew provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.

Comics, manga and anime can offer an interesting perspective from which to explore representations of the law in popular culture. This book offers a better understanding of the juridical subtexts of such cultural artefacts by bringing together scholars in legal theory and comparative and international law. While the contributions in the first part of the volume unpack the relationships between normative systems (law and morality above all) in graphic narratives by Marvel (Daredevil) and DC heroes (Batman), the second part of the volume looks at the role played by law and lawyers in different legal systems through case studies such as She Hulk. Finally, the last part focusses on the role of international law in the comic (multi)universe and in Japanese animation movies such as Porco rosso). This collection extends research into comics beyond Anglo-American culture, which is still hegemonic in this literature, and makes it possible to read the legal phenomena dealt with in the pop culture products analysed through a lens other than that of Anglo-American law.

From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect argues for the continued vitality of Law and Literature. Traditional methods of Law and Literature are combined with work in critical media studies, affect, and cultural narratology to address topics such as ethnonationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, and systemic racism in Germany and the United States. Taking stock of the diversification of the field at fifty years, this book understands Law and Literature as a political project. It has a precedent in inaugural Law and Literature texts such as Jacob Grimm's Von der Poesie im Recht (On the Poetry in Law) from 1815/16, which imagined an alternative legal order that was grounded in the unity of law, poetic language, and feeling. The political thrust of Law and Literature continues up into the present in the arts of BlackLivesMatter, which document and resist police violence. Law and Literature offers keys for understanding how legal identities are constructed, for analyzing how legal texts are constructed, and for comprehending how cultural-legal issues are mediated affectively. Using cultural, medial, affect theoretical, and narrative analyses of law, a revitalized Law and Literature offers a set of methods and theories with which to address the most pressing issues of the present.

This book employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique examination of the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but the material conditions under which those meanings are formulated. Using ethnographic and interview data, Anita Lam considers how textual representations of crime are assembled by various people (including writers, directors, technical consultants, and network executives), technologies (screenwriting software and whiteboards), and texts (newspaper articles and rival crime dramas). The emerging analysis does not project but instead concretely examines what and how television writers and producers know about crime, law and policing. An adequate understanding of the representation of crime, it is maintained, cannot be limited to a content analysis that treats the representation as a final product. Rather, a television representation of crime must be seen as the result of a particular assemblage of logics, people, creative ideas, commercial interests, legal requirements, and broadcasting networks. A fascinating investigation into the relationship between television production, crime, and the law, this book is an accessible and well-researched resource for students and scholars of Law, Media, and Criminology.

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The essays are organised into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television; (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and (3) content analysis of individual television shows with attention to big-picture jurisprudential questions of law's efficacy and the promise of justice. The book's content is organised to make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes in the following areas: media studies, law and culture, socio-legal studies, comparative law, jurisprudence, the law of lawyering, alternative dispute resolution and criminal law. Individual chapters have been contributed by, among others: Taunya Banks, Paul Bergman, Lief Carter, Christine Corcos, Rebecca Johnson, Stefan Machura, Nancy Marder, Michael McCann, Kimberlianne Podlas and Susan Ross, with an Introduction by Peter Robson and Jessica Silbey.