ABSTRACT
Questions of law’s authority are usually approached by enquiries into legal documents, such as legislation and judicial judgments. Within modern jurisprudential traditions these questions of law’s authority are usually debated and discussed by a focus upon texts already having authoritative legal status, and upon readers and interpreters credentialled already in law. Unacknowledged within these practices is the contingency of law’s authority upon interpretive conventions used by the common man and woman in their engagements with numerous forms of popular culture-novels, newspapers, films and television. In a Western culture it is the common man and woman’s enjoyments of these popular forms of culture, which maintain the interpretive conventions upon which the legal professional draws for producing certainty about the meaning of legal texts. The forms of enjoyment of popular culture provide a resource for lawyers in their practice of the legal hermeneutics of finding authoritative meanings to all the language-based texts of legal practice. The 1990s film Pretty Woman provides one form of popular culture in which questions of law’s authority and its contingency upon the pleasures and desires of the common man and woman can be pursued.
