ABSTRACT
Professor Chase describes the failure of American legal scholars to recognize the images of law and lawyers generated by mass culture as legitimate and important subjects for scholarly critique. The exclusion of these popular images from study is at a cost. The reduction of Conference on Critical Legal Studies (CLS) theory to a critique of law-as-ideology has resulted in a concentration of CLS publication in relatively obscure professional journals instead of more widely accessible formats like political weeklies and reviews or university and trade press book titles. This chapter describes the relation between politics and popular culture and provides an overview of the history of popular culture, suggesting why law schools generally (including those where CLS work is practiced) ignore the popular culture of lawyering. It focuses on disagreements with much CLS theory, and then concludes with a "primitive accumulation" of popular culture formats.
