Law on Film

Erin Brockovich (2000) (directed by Steven Soderbergh) is based on the true story of Erin Brockovich, a legal assistant without formal training, who uncovers one of the most significant environmental lawsuits in U.S. history: the case against Pacific Gas and Electric for contaminating groundwater in Hinkley, California. The film, which features an Oscar-winning performance by Julia Roberts in the title role, explores the role of lawsuits in exposing truth and gaining compensation for victims, the gendered dynamics of legal advocacy, and the challenges of taking on entrenched power structures in society.
Timestamps:
0:00     Introduction
1:59       Who is Erin Brockovich?
3:11       Obstacles to holding corporations accountable
5:49      How Erin Brockovich overcomes those obstacles
8:10      Imbalance of power and resources
14:40    Hinkley, California
18:00    Accessing records
21:16     Tort reform, punitive damages, and proportionality
27:10     States and environmental regulation
32:22    Causation and attribution science
37:30    Whistleblowers              
41:17      Finding the “smoking gun”
42:53    The practice of law and parenting

Further reading:
Banks, Sedina “The ‘Erin Brockovich Effect’: How Media Shapes Toxics Policy,” 26 Environs Env’t L. Poly’ J. 219 (2003)
Brockovich, Erin and Eliot, Marc, Take It from Me: Life’s a Struggle but You Can Win (2002)
Chen, Sarah Small, “Toxic Film: Analyzing the Impact of Films Depicting Major Contamination Events on the Regulation of Toxic Chemicals,” 35 Georgetown Env’t L. Rev. 561 (2023)
"'Erin Brockovich’ Made their Town Famous: They Still Don’t Have Clean Water,” Wash. Post (Dec. 27, 2024)
Martens, Daniel L. “Chromium, Cancer, and Causation: Has a Death-Blow Been Dealt Chromium Cases in California?” 16 Natural Resources & Env’t 264 (2002)
McCann, Michael McCann & Haltom, William, “Ordinary Heroes vs. Failed Lawyers – Public Interest Litigation in Erin Brockovich and Other Contemporary Films,” 33 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1045 (2008)
“Still Toxic After All These Years,” Grist (Jan. 29, 2019)
Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.com
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

This episode examines a case that sits at the uneasy boundary between criminal adjudication, media power, and moral authority: the prosecution and execution of Aileen Wuornos, labeled the “first female serial killer. We look at two documentaries by Nick Broomfield—Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)—alongside the feature film Monster (2003), written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Charlize Theron in an Oscar-winning role. Broomfield’s documentaries are less about guilt or innocence than about process: who controls the narrative, how legal representation operates, and what happens when a defendant’s life becomes an object of transaction, between lawyers, media, and the public. The films also penetrate the issues around the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the problems that arise when the state seeks to executive individuals who are themselves victims and suffer from severe mental illness. Monster  approaches the same facts through dramatization. It also raises important questions, including how far context should matter in judging criminal responsibility and construction of narratives around crimes.
Timestamps:
0:00   Introduction
2:58   Capturing law on film
5:24   The two Nick Broomfield documentaries
11:16   Addressing Aileen Wuornos’s murders
14:04  The flawed defense strategy
18:47  The depiction of Tyria Moore (Aileen Wuornos’s girlfriend
20:55  Selling the Aileen Wuornos story
23:09  The theme of the “monster”
28:29  Themes of betrayal and self-defense
31:53   Nick Broomfield and an outsider view of the American legal system
34:56  Mental illness and the death penalty
37:39  Media coverage of sensational murders 
39:22  Failures of the legal process
44:26  A critique of the death penalty
47:00  Exoticization in the films

Further Reading: 
Cavanaugh, L. Sheila, “‘White Trash:’ Abject Skin in Film Reviews of ‘Monster’,” in Skin, Culture, and Pscyhoanalysis (Cavanaugh, L. Sheila et al. eds.) (2013)
Dargis, Manohla, “Life and Death Issues,” Los Angeles Times (Jan. 9. 2004)
Diamond, Suzanna, “‘A Flower in a Hard Rain’: Melodramatic Storytelling by, and About, Aileen Wuornos,” Anthurium, vol. 15(2) (2019)
Horeck, Tanya, “From Documentary to Drama: Capturing Aileen Wuornos,” Screen, vol. 48(2), pp. 141-59 (Summer 2007)
Pearson, Kyra, “The Trouble with Aileen Wuornos, Feminism’s ‘First Serial Killer,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 4(3), pp. 256-75 (Sept. 2007
Smith, Abbe, “The ‘Monster’ in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators,” 38 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 367 (2005)

Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.com
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024) is Russian-language American documentary film written and directed by Julia Loktev (with co-director Anna Nemzer). The film describes the effort to maintain press freedoms in Putin’s Russia in the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The documentary provides an intimate portrait of independent Russian journalists—mainly young women—who risk everything to pursue truth and accountability amidst escalating repression under the Putin regime. Filmed in late 2021 and early 2022, the documentary captures how the legal machinery of censorship, surveillance, and state-harassment converged to crush internal dissent and incapacitate civil society. It not only provides a profoundly disturbing account of what has occurred in Russia but also serves as a broader warning about the fragility of press freedoms and in a time of rising authoritarianism worldwide. 
Timestamps:
0:00      Introduction
2:45       How the film came about
5:25       A primer on Russian censorship and repression
15:15      “Foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations”
23:32     Social marginalization through the creation of an enemies list 
28:46     State persecution of TV Rain and other independent media 
32:45     The manipulation of language
36:30     Identifying the pivotal moment 
43:36     How the film captures the elimination of press freedoms
48:26     Courts and lawyers
53:27     The Kremlin’s public mobilization to support the war in Ukraine
58:53     Independent journalism in exile
1:02:17   Parallels to the United States under Trump
Further reading:
Chang, Justin, “‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I’ Is a Staggering Portrait of Russian Journalists in Dissent,” New Yorker (Aug. 14, 2025)
Edel, Anastasia, “Putin vs. the Press,” Foreign Policy (Oct. 3, 2025)
Human Rights Watch, Russia’s Legislative Minefield: Tripwires for Civil Society Since 2020 (2024)
Human Rights Watch, Disrupted, Throttled, and Blocked State Censorship, Control, and Increasing Isolation of Internet Users in Russia (2025)
Krupskiy, Maxim, “The Impact of Russia’s ‘Foreign Agents’ Legislation on Civil Society,” Fletcher Russia & Eurasia Program (2023)
Troinovski, Anton & Safronova, Valeriya, “Russia Takes Censorship to New Extremes, Stifling War Coverage,” New York Times (May 18, 2022)
Yablokov, Ilya & Gatov, Vasily, “Broadcasting through the (New) Iron Curtain: Practices, Challenges, and Legacies of Russia's Independent Media in Exile,” Journalism Studies (Feb. 11, 2025)
Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.com
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

Small Things Like These (2024), adapted by Edna Walsh from Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, tells the story of how coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) uncovers disturbing secrets in a small Irish town in the mid-1980s. While going about his job delivering coal, Furlong discovers the truth about the Magdalene laundries—the abusive asylums run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 1820s until 1996. During this period, thousands of girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labor and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment. Furlong’s discovery about the local convent in his town parallels the story of his remembering and having to come to terms with his own traumatic childhood. The film provides a powerful and moving depiction life in a small Irish town, the role of the Magdalene laundries, and the power of the Roman Catholic Church to enforce a code of silence about the abuses taking place within a community. 

Timestamps:
0:00   Introduction
2:14     The Magdalene laundries
6:39    Laundries in a broader social context
13:02   The convent’s power and secrecy
17:18    The absence of guilty men
18:31   The banality of evil
20:34  Why the laundries lasted so long
24:00  How they ended
26:02  Inquiries and accountability
28:16   Focus on the laundries in films and popular culture
30:38  The Bill Furlong character
36:20  Ireland in the 1980s

Further reading:
Seán Patrick Donlan, “Screening for Help – Irish Care and Confinement," Film Ireland (Nov. 21, 2025)
Keegan, Claire, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber 2021) 
McGourty, Courtney, “Not Merely a Shameful Past: The Case for State Responsibility in the Magdalene Laundries,” Opinio Juris  (Aug 11, 2023) 
Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries (2013)
Smith, James M., Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment  (Univ. Notre Dame Press 2007)

Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.com
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

We return to Syriana, a film we discussed previously in Episode 40, but one that feels newly urgent in light of the current war with Iran. When it was released in 2005, the film offered a dense, unsettling portrait of a post-9/11 world shaped by oil, covert operations, and overlapping networks of state and corporate power. Today, Syriana reads less as a product of its time and more as a reflection of a sharp turn in U.S. foreign policy, shaped by the erosion of institutional guardrails and a naked military imperialism—with the current reality even more dystopian than the one depicted in the film.
0:00     Introduction
1:15        Why Syriana is so relevant to the U.S. military action in Iran
3:20      "The Committee for the Liberation of Iran”
6:47       Syriana as Dubai
9:15       Corruption moves from sidelines to the cabinet under Trump
12:06     The continued vulnerability of migrant workers
14:03     The loss of U.S. omnipotence on drone warfare
16:29     The involvement of Israel
18:33     The authoritarian turn in U.S. foreign policy
21:20     Syriana: a must watch now
Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.com
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast