Using Film in the Classroom

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Dec 17, 2013 - I use other film clips throughout the term, not only as a means to reinforce ..... early in the term, is from Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).
+(,121/,1( Citation: 21 Can. J. Women & L. 197 2009

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Using Film in the Classroom: The Call and the Responses / Le cinema dans la salle de classe: L'appel et les reponses The Call To complement our special issue on feminism, law, and film, we called for short submissions from feminist colleagues telling stories about the ways in which they have used film in the law school classroom. It is so rare that we share with each other the innovative pedagogies that we use on a daily basis, so this is a way to have at our fingertips a catalogue of moments in which teaching law has been enhanced through the use of film.

L 'appel Afin de completer le num~ro sur le f6minisme, le droit et le cinema, nous avons sollicit6 de courts textes de coll~gues f~ministes qui utilisent des films dans leur enseignement. II est tr~s rare que nous ayons l'occasion de partager entre nous des innovations p~dagogiques. Nous vous proposons donc ce catalogue de films qui vous permettra d'am~liorer vos enseignements du droit.

Responses / Les Riponses Elizabeth Adjin-Tettey and Freya Kodar, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria In the last few decades, the trespass torts, with their recognition of the importance of personal autonomy, bodily integrity, self-determination, and dignity, have become important tools for providing justice to survivors of systemic disadvantage, discrimination, and harm.' Thus, one of the more rewarding and difficult sections of our torts course focuses on using the trespass torts to protect individual autonomy and dignity. After learning about the general principles of the trespass torts, especially the law's requirement that there be consent to any form of bodily interference, we look more particularly 1

See John McLaren, "The Intentional Torts to the Person Revived? Protecting Autonomy, Dignity and Emotional Welfare in a Pluralist Society" (2002) 17 Supreme Court Law Review

(2d) 66. CJWL/RFD doi: 10.3138/cjwl.21.1.197

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at medical battery, sexual wrongdoing, and unlawful sterilization by state officials. One of the sterilization cases that we discuss is Muir v. Alberta, a case brought by Leilani Muir against the government of Alberta for battery and false imprisonment for confining her to the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives from 1955, when she was ten years old, until 1965, and2 for sterilizing her without her knowledge or consent at the age of fourteen. We use a number of pedagogical tools to look at this case. We read both "the case"-excerpts from the decision regarding Muir's claim and the quantum of damages for the confinement and battery 3-and Gerald Robertson's expert witness report to the court on the eugenics movement 4 and its influence on the province's Sexual Sterilization Act. Simply reading texts that describe experiences and realities, particularly written from places of privilege such as the Bench and academia, "risks distancing ...readers from the issues and thereby failing to engender empathy for the marginalized." 5 In line with the growing use of film as text and the power of images on audiences, we resort to another text, the documentary film The Sterilizationof Leilani Muir.6 The viewing experience is an intimate one as we ask students to watch the film on their own or in small groups in the library's viewing room. This is partly to allow them to deal with emotions that tend to arise from seeing the documentary for the first time. The documentary and expert report provide important historical and social background about the broader context of Muir's confinement and sterilization. Namely, that it was rooted in the eugenics movement, whose proponents believed that the human race could be "improved" by controlling who could reproduce. This belief underpinned the sterilization legislation enacted in both Alberta and British Columbia to prevent people with "undesirable" characteristics from procreating to ensure they did not pass on their "disabilities" to future generations. 7 The legislation and sterilization of persons perceived to be living with disabilities persisted notwithstanding the existence of scientific evidence at that time that the "undesirable" characteristics were not hereditary. Such a perspective was clearly a project in social engineering to create the "perfect" human race and society and a mechanism for oppressing marginalized people. As both the Robertson report and the documentary show, people who were marginalized and who lacked social 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Muir v. Alberta (1996), 36 Alta L.R. (3d) 305, 179 A.R. 321, 132 D.L.R. ( 41h) 695 (Q.B.). The province admitted liability in battery for the unlawful sterilization. Sexual Sterilization Act, S.A. 1928, c. 37. Repealed by the Sexual Sterilization Repeal Act, 1972, S.A. 1972, c. 87. Elizabeth Adjin-Tettey et al., "Postcard from the Edge (of Empire)" (2008) 17 Social and Legal Studies 5at 9. The Sterilization of Leilani Muir (North West Center, National Film Board, Canada, 1996). Sexual Sterilization Act, S.B.C. 1933c. 59, repealed by the Sexual Sterilization Act Repeal Act, S.B.C. 1973, c. 79.

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power-women, First Nations and M~tis, immigrants and people of eastern European heritage, and poor people and people living in government-run institutions-were much more likely to have the legislation applied to them. For these people, procreation was not a matter of personal autonomy whereby individuals can make their own decisions about reproduction without state interference. Rather, it became a privilege that the state selectively bestowed on those considered to be deserving of shaping society and those who could determine future generations. The Sterilization of Leilani Muir is particularly powerful in that it weaves the history of the eugenics movement with Muir's personal history and her search for justice through her court action. Much of this information is present in the written texts, but the documentary adds another dimension to the story telling-Muir is able to speak to us in her own voice. The images and voices give us the opportunity to humanize her and the others who were sterilized by the state. The visual images and the viewing intimacy combine to provide "an entry point into the lives of people on the margins [and allow the audience to empathize with them] in ways that are not possible with the use of text only." 8 The documentary leaves a much more lasting impression on students than might otherwise have been the case if we read only the conventional texts. We use the Muir documentary as a way of challenging hegemonic processes about teaching and learning law. However, more importantly, we use the documentary to infuse a human element into a very difficult case. We often try to remind our students and ourselves that the cases we study are personal and painful for the people involved. Yet, the way in which law is taught, particularly in first year, with its focus on finding the general principles or ratios to take away from cases, often means abstracting the legal subjects from their lived experiences. As a result, we often lose sight of their humanity or victimization. Moreover, we often find ourselves deleting difficult or disturbing facts from the edited versions of the cases that we assign partly to protect our students and partly to protect the victims from repeated exposure and re-victimization. However, by so doing, we often reinforce the abstraction that is perceived to be central to legal analysis. Using the Muir documentary allows us to break away from that "norm" and offer students a rare glimpse into the lives of survivors that is often lacking in law school classrooms. It also shows the struggles that survivors go through in deciding to take on the perpetrators of violence and injustice against them, the trial process, the limitations of litigation, and the compromises that survivors have to make in order to achieve some justice.

8.

Adjin-Tettey et al., supra note 5 at 9.

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Tamra Alexander, Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick I have used film in two classes-business organizations and professional conduct. In business organizations, the class viewed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). We then used it as the discussion base for our examination of corporate governance issues and corporate counsel/legal ethics issues. There was quite a lively discussion of the issues in this class and in subsequent classes when analogous issues arose. In professional conduct, I used film in two ways. We used the beginning scene from Liar, Liar (1997), starring Jim Carrey, to discuss a lawyer's obligations to his/her client and to the court. (As a result of his client's behaviour in the courtroom, Jim Carrey's character is certain that his client committed the sexual assault on the student.) This also generated a spirited discussion with some very strong opposing views on how Jim Carrey's character should have responded. I showed the final clip of the movie (where Jim Carrey's character does what we are supposed to agree is the "right" thing) part way through the discussion, and it raised issues related to different views of what a lawyer should do (for example, the public's view as opposed to the view of the profession, the media's view, and so on). I also used film as part of the students' written assignment for the class. Each student could choose to view one of the following films: Class Action (1991), starring Gene Hackman; Liar, Liar (1997), starring Jim Carrey; or The Verdict (1982), starring Paul Newman. They chose one ethical issue that the lawyer in the film faced and had to analyze the issue in light of five ethical frameworks that we had discussed in class. The five ethical frameworks were based on the following articles: "

Sharon Dolovich, "Ethical Lawyering and the Possibility of Integrity" (2002) 70 Fordham Law Review 1629. " Stephen Ellmann, "The Ethic of Care as an Ethic for Lawyers" (1993) 81 Georgetown Law Journal 2665. * Charles Fried, "The Lawyer as Friend" (1975) 85 Yale Law Journal 1060. " David Tanovich, "Law's Ambition and Reconstruction of Role Morality in Canada" (2005) 28 Dalhousie Law Journal 267. " Randal Graham, "Defining 'the Good Lawyer': An Economic Account of Legal Ethics" (October 2003), . Students were then asked to articulate a personal framework that could be derived from one of the articles or could be their own product. Students were to explain and justify their framework and then apply it to the ethical issue in the film. This project was a highly reflective piece of work.

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Karen Busby, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba In the early 2000s, Keith Louise Fulton, a University of Winnipeg women's studies professor showed three award-winning videos by video artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Milan to a special pre-university course for high school students on women and art. The short videos, titled "We're Talking Vulva," "A Day in the Life of Bull Dyke," and "Subject/Object," are about women's sexual knowledge, desire, and agency. There were some lesbian references but no explicit sexual activity (other than a chaste kiss), although a comical four-foot-high vulva was worn as a costume throughout one video and used to discuss how the vulva worked. Some parents were furious, and a media uproar ensued in Winnipeg partly over whether the films were properly classified and appropriate for students in Grades 11-12. I showed the videos in a gender and the law seminar to the apprehension of some students who believed I might be a purveyor of porn. We then had a terrific discussion on, among other things, insidious censorship of queer work and media-driven moral outrage campaigns. I also assigned the students the quite impossible task of attempting to classify the films using the criteria established by the Manitoba film classification board. By having the students watch the actual films and then reread the media accounts, the seminar created one of those moments where students felt in their bones the problems associated with actively endorsing censorship.

Gillian Calder, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria I introduce my family law course with the argument that the notion of "who is the family" in family law has become increasingly more contested, such that a more traditional approach to family law focusing on marriage as the primary means for constituting family is no longer possible. I also argue that that are three key forces influencing our present understanding of family formation. The first is law, and it obviously necessitates an examination of the various ways in which law is implicated in both the creation and the regulation of families. The second major force on our understanding of family is that we have them: ones that we form with our parents and extended families and ones that we form with our partners, children, and other relationships of choice. Identifying that having families is a force in our understanding of what constitutes "family" is particularly important for classroom dynamics, as how we engage with questions of law's regulation of the family in a room full of people differently situated but all affected by the issues raised needs careful attention. Finally, I argue that the media and popular culture are key transmitters of normativity and, as such, play a powerful role in perpetuating understandings of some forms of family as being more privileged than others.

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To make this latter point visible, I begin the course by showing a short clip from the critically acclaimed documentary film March of the Penguins (2005) (from the beginning of Chapter 2 until the middle of Chapter 4). The scene shows the arrival of emperor penguins at their traditional mating site "to pursue their journey's purpose"-finding a mate and procreating. I then ask the students to articulate the kinds of themes that pertain to family formation and ideas of the family that they saw in the short scene and, in particular, what the clip tells them about what a family should be. I then tell them that the film is the second highest grossing documentary in the history of American film and get them to speculate why that might be and what sorts of challenges to ideas of family might the film's popularity make visible. The students' responsesissues of nature and anthropomorphism, heteronormativity, monogamy, shared caregiving, and parenthood, among other issues-then allow the questioning of why the nuclear family has become the dominant notion of family in Canada. I ask them, ultimately, to speculate why I might start the course with this film clip and offer them the argument that we can learn a lot about what is at the heart of Canadian family law and, in particular, the essence of marriage, by looking at, and thinking about, this popular representation of emperor penguins. I use other film clips throughout the term, not only as a means to reinforce the argument that popular culture plays a dominant role in our understanding of what families should be but also as way of reaching the various and diverse learners in the class. Using other media, including visual, theatrical, groupbased discussion, and role playing, is part of engaging students in the difficult task of learning family law. The Full Monty (1997), for example, is another means of introducing the influence of popular culture's influence on our understandings of family. Who is the hero of the film? Why does Gaz need to raise money through a strip tease show? How is the relationship between Nathan and his mother represented in the film? I also use a scene from The Princess Bride (1987) to discuss the formalities of marriage. Given the fraud, duress, and her non-utterance of "I do" is Princess Buttercup's marriage to Prince Humperdinck void, voidable, or valid? As well, a scene from Intolerable Cruelty (2003) is an effective way to set up an exercise on marriage contracts, and the documentary film, Journey Home: Reclaiming Our Children (2005) is a powerful means through which to contextualize the issues raised in Racine v. Woods around the significance of bonding and culture in the lives of First Nations youth today. 9

9.

Racine v. Woods, [1983] 2S.C.R. 173. For a discussion of this film as a means of understanding the issues in Racine, see Gillian Calder, "'Finally I Know Where I Am Going to Be From': Culture, Context and Time in a Look Back at Racine v. Woods," in Kim Brooks, ed., One Woman's Difference: The Contributions of Justice Bertha Wilson (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009) 245.

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Finally, as I finish up the law class of the year, I roll the final scene from March of the Penguins with the credits. The movie ends with the omnipotent Morgan Freeman telling us: "It is now December and they [the new chicks] are ready to leave the place where they were born." This statement is not only a lovely reinforcement of the power of film's engagement with issues of parenting but also a timely reminder of how at the end of the semester, and with the fabulous training they have received, the students are ready to head out into the world without me!

Sharon Cowan, School of Law, University of Edinburgh I often use film when teaching my criminal law class both to point out the ways in particular that legal or criminal justice issues are portrayed in popular culture and to compare with the ways in which we do, or should, deal with such issues in the United Kingdom. For instance, when exploring the Scots law of provocation in homicide cases, I show the song "He had it coming" from Rob Marshall's film Chicago (2002) in order to invite my students to say whether or not the women imprisoned alongside Roxy Hart and Velma Kelly would have the defence of provocation open to them had the events leading to their arrests taken place in Edinburgh. And in my criminal justice class, I often play the "Officer Krupke" song from West Side Story (1961), directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, to prompt a discussion about different theories on the causes of crime as well as about the importance of criminal justice interagency co-operation, particularly for young offenders. I also use the song "They Both Reached for the Gun" from Chicago to explore the ways in which stories about crime are socially constructed and the role of the media in this process. I use this technique as pedagogical tool for stimulating the memory-I find that the cinematic representations of criminal law and criminal justice are often more entertaining to students than either my verbal presentation of information or the often dense academic literature, and, as such, the ideas often remain longer in their minds. I am using film not only because, of course, it is fun to do so but also because I think it is important to bring to light the things that film can teach us about our legal and social world. Film can help us understand that laws are produced through a process of socio-political negotiation and that, in turn, law is a powerful force in the way in which our social realities are constructed. As Rebecca Johnson and Ruth Buchanan have said of law and film, there is much to learn by taking cinematic portrayals of law very seriously, not as representations of the "truth" of law but, rather, as analogies for how law itself operates in helping to construct truth.' 0 10.

Rebecca Johnson and Ruth Buchanan, "Getting the Insider's Story Out: What Popular Film Can Tell Us about Legal Method's Dirty Secret" (2001) 20 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 87at 88.

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Laurence-Lea Fontaine, Professeure, Universite du Quibec d Montrial (UQAM) Je projette deux films i mes 6tudiant-e-s du Baccalaur~at en droit dans deux cours diff~rents: Droit des rapports collectifs du travail (JUR3505UQAM) et Droit social et du travail compar6 et international (JUR6625UQAM). L'un des deux est Maxime, Mc Duffet Mc Do (2002)." Ce film d'une tr~s grande qualit6 raconte l'aventure syndicale de deux jeunes employ~s du gqant Mc Donald. Le r~alisateur engage, Magnus Isacsson, n'en est pas d son coup d'essai et est d l'origine de plusieurs documentaires-dont Le Nouvel habit de l'Empereur, Operation Salami, Vue du Sommet (< http://www.socialdoc.net/magnus/> ). Dans ce film, Isacsson met sous les feux des projecteurs les efforts de deux jeunes militants. Si leur inexperience leur causera de nombreux ennuis, leurs profondes convictions et leur courage les m~nera loin dans la lutte contre l'anti-syndicalisme pratiqu6 par Mc Do. Ce film permet de mettre en exergue plusieurs questions notamment relatives A l'acc~s A une defense collective des conditions de travail, A la syndicalisation de milieux de travail dominos par l'animus anti-syndical d'employeurs transnationaux, voire mondiaux, les luttes intersyndicales. Mais ce documentaire met aussi en lumi~re d'autres sujets comme le militantisme, voire le jeune militantisme vs le vieux militantisme, le travail chez les jeunes, la manipulation des jeunes par le discours adulte (les jeunes femmes du Mc Do Peel de Montreal dsinform~es par leur manager), etc. Le deuxi~me film est Les femmes de la Brukman.1 2 Ce merveilleux film souligne le courage d'ouvri~res et d'ouvriers argentins qui lors de la crise financi~re de 2001 ont fait face d l'employeur et A l'Etat pour sauver leurs emplois. Exploits par leurs patrons, ces ouvridres et ouvriers &aient peu ou prou pay~s, exploit~s. Lors de l'abandon de leur usine par l'employeur, les ouvri~res et ouvriers l'ont occup~e. Apr~s des mois de luttes et de nombreux d~m~l~s avec la justice pour r~cup6rer leur usine, les ouvrires et ouvriers boivent du mat6, 6coutent de la musique ... tout en travaillant et dirigeant leur usine autogre ! Ces travailleurs se nomment (( travailleurs dirigeants d'entreprise >. Ce film permet de mettre en exergue plusieurs questions notamment relatives A]a dignit6 au travail ainsi qu'A la dignit6 au travail par le travail, A la solidarit6 ouvri~re et citoyenne, au rapport de forces entre employeurs et employ~s, aux cooperatives et A l'autogestion, A la mondialisation de l'6conomie. Celles-ci peuvent &re pos~es A travers le prisme d'approches f~ministes, citoyennes, etc. I. 12.

Maxime, Mc Dutff et Mc Do (2002, Quebec, franqais, 52mn), producteurest Marcel Simard-Productions Virage, < http://www.virage.ca/article.php3?idarticle= 104>. Les femmes de la Brukman (2007, Quebec, espagnol-sous-titres franqais), productions ISCA, .

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Rebecca Johnson, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria I use Clint Eastwood's now-classic western film Unforgiven (1993) in my criminal law class, both as an introduction to criminal law and as a text that we return to throughout the year. At the beginning of the term, I arrange for the students to view the entire film during a lab time. We then (as early as the second or third class) discuss the first five minutes of the film. The film begins in a brothel where two cowboys violently attack and disfigure the prostitute Delilah (who had the temerity to giggle at the size of one of the cowboy's penis). The sheriff is summoned to the saloon, where Skinny (the owner of the brothel) has the cowboys tied up. The Sherriff, Skinny, and the other prostitutes debate the appropriate punishment. After re-screening the fiveminute clip in class, I break the students into groups, asking them to identify the injuries and harms they see and to come up with a fair sentence. This enables them to start making visible their own normative assumptions about crime and punishment, to discuss them with each other, and to explain their conclusions based on the "evidence" they saw in the film. The exercise facilitates two discussions. First, it nicely sets up a tension between "criminal" and "civil" trials. The prostitutes, theorizing the offence through the lens of criminal law, see the slashing as a gendered attack on the community of women as a whole and seek to have both cowboys whipped or even hung. Skinny, on the other hand, frames the injury in terms of "contract" and "property." He has, he tells us, paid for Delilah-he made an investment of property, the property is now damaged, and he will not realize on his investment. He seeks direct compensation for his economic loss. The clip fosters a lively discussion of the nature of "criminal law" itself (what makes something a "true crime"). It also enables a discussion of how law (in the film) intervenes to compensate for some injuries and not for others as well as the 13 place of gender in producing and identifying both civil and criminal harms. Second, given the ubiquity of guilty pleas in criminal law, the clip provides us with a concrete opportunity to discuss the sentencing provisions in the Criminal Code. 14 In the first five-minute clip, there are two "sentencing judgments." The first is by the sheriff, who fines the cowboys (each is to provide a specific number of ponies to Skinny in the springtime, the number of 13.

14.

In other contexts, Ruth Buchanan and I have used this film to explore the gendered dimensions of international law and to consider the place of law and film in holding certain kinds of women in and out of public space. For a fuller discussion of what this film makes visible about the gendering practices of law, see Ruth Buchanan and Rebecca Johnson, "The Unforgiven Sources of International Law: Nation-building, Violence, and Gender in the West(ern)," in Doris Buss and Ambreena Manji, eds., International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005) 131; and Rebecca Johnson, "Law and the Leaky Woman: The Saloon, the Liquor Licence, and Narratives of Containment" (2005) 19(2) Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 181. Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, s. 264.

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ponies differing with the extent of culpability). The second is the "extra-legal" sentence imposed by the prostitutes who, enraged by the legal failure to acknowledge them as harmed subjects of law, pool their money and offer it as a bounty on the heads of both cowboys. The students consider each of these two sentencing judgments. To what extent do the sentences advance the fundamental principle expressed in section 718.1 that "a sentence must be proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender"? To what extent do the two judgments meet the (internally contradictory) fundamental purposes and objectives of sentencing set out in section 718 (denunciation, deterrence [both specific and general], incarceration, rehabilitation, reparations, responsibility, and acknowledgement of harm to victims). The clip (and the ensuing discussion) helps make concrete the differences between utilitarian and normative explanations of sentencing. Throughout the term, we return to the film to explore principles of substantive and procedural law. We spend some time exploring the scene in which the sheriff administers a brutal beating to English Bob (who has come into town wearing a gun, in the face of a sign prohibiting guns). We use the scene to discuss the operation of general deterrence (the beating as an occasion to warn off other potential bounty hunters who might otherwise come to town), "ignorance of law" as a defence, the law of attempt (that is, in the face of Bob's clear intent to claim the bounty, what "steps" would move us beyond "mere preparation"?), and the use of (excessive?) force by police officers in section 25 of the Criminal Code. We explore the conditions in which Ned "confesses" during a police interrogation. We discuss issues of mens rea and actus reus in the eventual killing of both cowboys by a "team" of killers. As one group assignment, I ask the students to identify all parties to the killings of cowboys Mike and Davey, Ned Logan, Skinny, and the sheriff and to provide evidence of the ways in which those people participated. Here, the film provides the tools to explore the parties provisions in section 21 of the Criminal Code (committing, aiding, abetting; common intention and abandonment), the law relating to counselling (the women offering the bounty) and conspiracy; and the possibility of various legal defences for different parties. In all of these discussions, we use the film as a primary text, asking what it is that we are and are not shown, what we presume, and how it is that we "know." We consider the evidence that the film gives us on both sides of a given issue. In the context of a criminal law class, there is, of course, any number of films that one might use for any number of issues. One of the real advantages of weaving one particular film throughout the term is that it provides a collective point of reference. Once all of the students have seen the film, they share a common factual narrative that can be returned to again and again. It also gives us a shared point of reference for articulating questions about how class, race, and gender are operating in the background at numerous moments.

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Jennifer L. Schulz, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba Reading my article in this issue will clue readers to my interest in the connections between conflict resolution and food. So when I was asked to reflect upon using film in the law classroom, my mind immediately went to my negotiation course and the seven-minute animated Canadian short I always screen in my first class, entitled Dinner for Two (1997), directed by Jnet Perlman. This film depicts two lizards fighting over the same tasty bug and a frog who ultimately helps them find a compromise solution. My students and I discuss the film after viewing it, and, even on the first day of class, they can see how Dinner for Two demonstrates conflict escalation and the missed opportunities in disputes for resolution. The film effectively highlights the pitfalls of a legalistic, competitive approach to conflict, the problems that ensue when conflicts are brought into the public eye, and the fact that mediators and other neutral third parties can help with the process of conflict resolution, often more than lawyers can. Conflict resolution films such as Dinnerfor Two are excellent heuristics and wonderful to use in the classroom. Students enjoy watching and analyzing films in class, especially in law schools where film viewing is a marked contrast from the typical, appellate judgment-based curriculum. Critically studying filmic depictions of conflict resolvers is not only enjoyable for students, but it also exposes them to feelings, perspectives, and approaches that may be different from their "default" positions and are certainly different from law school teachings that typically focus on litigation and lawyers rather than on conflict resolution and clients. Dinner for Two focuses on the benefits of negotiating and adopting collaborative conflict resolution approaches to disputes. As such, it tells a different conflict resolution story than legal texts do and surfaces previously unknown images, voices, and options in the process. Dinnerfor Two challenges students to reverse law's dominant logic and helps engender in them the sensitivities needed to fully engage in processes of conflict resolution with real life disputants and clients-all that in seven fun minutes! Christina Spiesel, Yale Law School Video is everywhere in the law these days and likely to become more so. Even the Supreme Court of the United States recently decided a case on the basis of video evidence-Scott v. Harris.15 Meanwhile, cameras in the hands of members of the public create "sous-veillance" evidence to counter more official stories and these have galvanized both the public in relation to police 15.

Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372 (2007).

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actions and the police in relation to cameras. Video can come from cell phones, handheld camcorders, dashboard camera, and, now, even tasers. Official stories can come from material recorded from surveillance cameras mounted all over cities and along major roadways as well as from major media, film, and television. It is imperative that students become critical thinkers about those picture streams. Law students have even more of a "duty of care," I believe, because judgments of legal truth are being made partly based on these materials. In my teaching (which yields student-made digital video as a final project), we look at video clips of all kinds and always a documentary as a "text." While we use a different film every year, a personal favorite is Stranger with a Camera (2000) by Elizabeth Barret about the murder of Hugh O'Connor in Appalachia. The material is layered, focusing on the significance of the camera, and the film's flaws, such as they are, yield good discussion. The filmmaker is from the very community that she portrays. Aside from learning about relevant subject matter and practising its analysis, there are also other reasons to use video in the context of teaching law. Taking students into the editing lab to edit video, I find every semester that students discover that all of those years of television, movies, and video gaming have yielded a literacy they did not know they had because it had never been actively called forth. Since I do see a writing sample as part of their first project, I can also add that some students whose writing is not of the best quality have been crack film editors, deploying video material with a fluency and film grammar complexity that is not evident in their legal writing. Playing to student strengths can be empowering to them and can give them confidence to take on the challenges of more traditional legal texts and tasks. Furthermore, discussing a piece of video is best done as a group without the professor telling the students all of the answers up front. Parsing video clips to discover what is there can help students to contribute their voices where they might have been inclined to be silent and their inevitably varied responses can open up diverse meanings in the video that is under consideration. Learning of the range of responses among viewers can teach students how complex communication is, how contested meaning can be, and how much they need to question their assumptions about any messages, especially legal ones. As they learn that their own experience can have relevance, the underlying issues in their legal problems can become more salient to them. It is not that they should abandon the effort to apply reason and rules and objectivity about factual information but, rather, that they should see the conflicts in law as related to embodied human life.

Lorna Turnbull, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba I teach the compulsory income tax law and policy course at the University of Manitoba, and I try to introduce some of the concepts we discuss

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using video clips that engage the students' interest. The first one I use, very early in the term, is from Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979). In this scene, the John Cleese character is complaining to the rest of his Christian followers about the taxes that the Romans levy, with the moaning refrain: "What have the Romans ever done for us?" His followers tentatively suggest that they have built roads and aqueducts, provided education, peace and security, among other things. Each time a new suggestion is made Cleese moans: "Yeah well, aside from roads, aqueducts, education, peace and security, what have the Romans ever done for us?" The clip is just under two minutes in length and with a healthy measure of humour introduces the idea that tax revenue is essential to the basic functioning of the state and the many public goods that we may take for granted. It is a healthy antidote to the sometimes prevalent notion that taxes are inherently "bad." A second clip I use later in the term is from The Simpsons. It is a scene where Bart attempts to get an autograph from Krusty the Clown by slipping him a cheque, which he will endorse and which will be returned to Bart by his bank after Krusty cashes it. Unfortunately for Bart, Krusty stamps the back of the cheque with the words "Cayman Islands Offshore Holding Corporation," instead of signing it. Bart takes it to the bank to complain and a very fast investigation ensues, the result of which is that Krusty is arrested for tax evasion or as the news announcer says "avoision." This clip provides a useful introduction to the concepts of evasion and avoidance.

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