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TV LEGAL PUNDITS IN TRAINING
You’ll never guess what
they’re teaching in law schools these days. They’re teaching ripped
from the TV plot lines – and the art of TV punditry. I bet its happening across the
country but I’ll stick to what I know first hand. Every year I address students
at Oh, and by the way, Wiehl just
happens to be married to famed defense attorney Mickey Sherman. She sees this “intersection” between law and the
media from all sides. Professor Wiehl wants her students
to learn about the media pressure they’ll face if they ever get that big, white hot, headline grabbing case. So, I come
in and speak about the lengths to which reporters will go to get their story. I warn them that if they become
the lawyer representing a company in trouble for, say, making a dangerous or faulty consumer item I will use every trick in
my reporter’s book to get information they do not want me to have. If their
client is a celebrity in the news the stakes go even higher as the paparazzi fueled journalism of today knows few boundaries. If they sign on with a known criminal I’m on them like white on rice. I tell them some of my own experiences
getting and confirming information … and they always seem surprised at the depths to which reporters will dig while
on the search for truth. In short, I tell the students
it’s pretty much like they see on TV. When you stop to think about
it Professor Wiehl’s course makes perfect sense. “Law school students want
to be entertained like the rest of us,” she told me recently. “And
many of them are in law school because they’ve watched Law and Order, Ally McBeal, Boston Legal or any number of these
other TV shows and they fell in love with the law.” But Wiehl says once the students
get to law school it’s a bit like Lucy forever moving the football just as Charlie Brown runs up to kick it. “They see these TV lawyers
and prosecutors waging great battles for justice but once they get to law school they realize … its civil procedures
and wills and contracts and all this boring stuff!” Part of Wiehl’s syllabus
includes students getting an imaginary taste of how the real world of cable TV uses lawyers.
At the end of each class students are handed a note to replicate a call from a booker at a place like Fox, MSNBC or
CNN with the bare bones of a “breaking news story”. The student gets
just 5 minutes to silently digest the information. During that time, they are told, the limo is on its way, they will be whisked
to the TV studio, rushed into a make up room, and suddenly they’ll be in the glare of lights being questioned –
hard – by Wiehl acting like one of her Fox TV colleagues. “I tell them they can’t
move, they have to stare straight ahead as if looking into the camera,” she tells me. “It’s a great technique
to help them learn to think on their feet and stay focused in their thinking, even if they never get on TV.” And then there are the days
the students, literally, watch television in class. After they see clips of specific
law show scenarios (many taken from real-life cases) they have rousing class discussions on serious issues: If a lawyer learns from a client
where a body is buried is he or she compelled to keep confidentiality and condemn a grieving family to a life of uncertainty? And from another episode: A suspect is thrown in the back of a squad car where he
hides a gun between the seat cushions. Knowing another perp could find the gun
and kill officers does the defense lawyer have an ethical obligation to tell? Does
a prosecutor have the duty to try all the suspects taken from a crime scene or just the one with the gun? Compelling questions asked of
students just beginning to form their ethical and moral core.
Its art imitating life …
and life turning it back on its ear to teach some valuable lessons.
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What a dilemma! Lis Wiehl and Diane Dimond two of the most respected, intelligent and beautiful women teaching the same
class. Even at 55 I would be a babbling idiot and would not stand a chance of concentrating in the room.
The description of the media circus is intense and the
fate of someones life guilty or innocent and the suffering family's endless pain and suffereing is very dependent on their
lawyers ethics and composure in 5 minutes not 15 minutes of fame. Many law school graduates move into business as they
cannot handle the routine drudgery, it can be worse in corporate law.
I like the article, you have two of my favorites, I saw Mickey
on Hannity's America last night explaining the gun dilemna. There is no real point here. Just an admiring fan putting in his two cents.
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