Legal Negotiation in Popular Culture: What Are We Bargaining For?

Abstract:     
This essay analyzes the treatment of legal negotiations in films, literature, TV and various forms of popular culture, focusing on how legal negotiations are conceptualized often as competitive, war-like battles of will and force or cleverness, rather than more modern approaches to negotiation as a site of collaborative human problem solving and joint decision making. The essay begins a filmography of legal negotiation, including both popular films and TV and serious documentary treatments of both domestic and international negotiations. The article concludes by discussing some newer approaches to legal and international conflict negotiations evidenced in a few new films and documentaries and suggests that life is advancing faster than art in this area: to wit, modern negotiations are more complex in execution, performance and agreement-making and are not well depicted in many fictional and formulaic forms.

Keywords: Negotiation, Law and Popular Culture, Literature, Legal Ethics

Accepted Paper Series