ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with something of a mystery. As we have noted in the preceding chapters the general thrust of interest in law films has been the criminal trial. Within this we have a concentration on murder trials within the American system. This helps to explain why one of the principal focuses of legal scholarship, the judge, has only a limited role in law films.1 The judiciary and their doctrinal work, interpreting and developing the meaning of rules, continues to be a focus of much academic work, yet this focus has not been meaningfully translated onto film. Similarly the jury are largely absent from legal film, although as if to counter this Twelve Angry Men (1957) immediately springs to mind as an important exception. The question here is twofold: how we explain the general absence of both groups but also what we can understand from the portrayals that we have identified. With judges we have attempted to draw out a number of general categories that portrayals usually fall into. Due to the limitations on the character the categorisations are perhaps more one dimensional than that of lawyers.
