Angelina Jolie, Her “Bone-Headed Overzealous Lawyer” and Aviram on Lawyers’ Perspectives

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

It’s not often we get to link up Angelina Jolie with a piece of legal scholarship, but when the opportunity arises, we jump on it.

The New York Times reports this morning a contretemps over an agreement Angelina wanted reporters to sign before interviewing her at the premiere of her new movie, A Mighty Heart, about Daniel and Mariane Pearl.  The agreement would have forbade reporters from asking her about her personal relationships, and would have required that “the interview . . . not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning or derogatory to Ms. Jolie.”  Angelina’s lawyer, Robert Offer, tried to take the blame, saying he was responsible for the statement, and calling himself a “bone-headed, overzealous lawyer.”

This is a theme I’ve harped on.  It’s no surprise that legal academia has a strongly reductionist bias, because the nature of thinking with a legal mental model is self-contained and reductionist.  That’s a casually empirical, but nevertheless strongly held view, on my part, but I was interested to see some real empirical work on this subject on SSRN recently.  Hadar Aviram (Hastings, Tel Aviv, right) has posted Trapped in the Law:  Legal Actors’ Attitudes Toward Legal Practice as a Solution for Social Problems.  Here is the abstract:

Courtroom dynamics literature hasstudied the interactions within the ‘courtroom workgroup’ -prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, attributing legal practicesin the courtroom to the effects of power struggles and professionalinterest conflicts between the actors. This paper reintroduces into thepicture the important factor of formal law and legal indoctrination,claiming that much of the actors’ opinions and behaviors can beattributed to their inability to introduce external perceptions of theproblems they address into the legal framework within which theyoperate. The paper is based on 40 in-depth interviews with prosecutors,defense attorneys and ex-judges in the Israeli military justice systemabout cases involving disobedience to military service – desertion,unauthorized absences and conscientious objection. The interviewsreveal the overpowering effect of legal indoctrination on theperception of these problems and their solutions. Almost allinterviewees use the doctrinal legal categorization as the maindefinition of the problems they deal with, despite their understandingof the political and socio-economic dimensions of the problems. Theirpolicy suggestions are equally limited. Almost all intervieweesperceive a tension between their perception and the broader, socialdefinitions of the problem, and have different ways of resolving it:loyalism, bureaucratic thinking, idealism, cynicism and limitedinnovation. The findings shed light on the impact of legalcommunications and disciplinary discourse on individual perceptions,and support the usage of discursive theory – focusing on Luhmann andTeubner’s autopoiesis – as a strong explanation of professionalbehavior and interaction, even at the individual level.