This week American Bar Association President Karen J. Mathis is presenting the Association’s 50^th annual Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts. In 1958 ABA President Charles S. Rhyne presented the first Silver Gavels “to recognize outstanding contributions to public information and understanding of the roles of law and courts in our society.” In this post, I’m taking a selective look back at 50 years of Silver Gavel Awards, focusing on the category of legal drama from the media of film and television. Taken together, the set of Silver Gavel Award-winning dramas presents quite a fascinating history of popular culture. They can offer us insights into prevailing attitudes towards law and lawyers during the past half-century. Moreover, they also reveal something about the changing video culture through which legal issues have been dramatized since the late 1950s.

The Silver Gavels are presented “for Media and the Arts.” This is to make clear that these are not only awards for journalism or news media. From the very beginning, the Association has recognized that legal drama has an unmatched capacity to humanize legal actors and, well, dramatize legal issues for public audiences. There’s an obvious potential connection to exploit between the human conflict of legal disputation and the drama that can make for powerful and accessible storytelling.  In short, legal drama provides an incomparable means to foster public understanding of law, legal issues, and legal institutions--which is what the Silver Gavel Awards are all about.

In the Silver Gavel’s very first year, 1958, Charles Rhyne presented the award for Sidney Lumet’s classic jury room drama Twelve Angry Men (United Artists), starring Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb. During the next five years, both Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer Corp., 1962 Silver Gavel) and To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal-International Pictures, 1963 Silver Gavel),starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, were recognized by the ABA. The award for To Kill a Mockingbird, evidently echoing the Supreme Court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright that year, cited it for “dramatizing the individual right to counsel and the lawyer’s duty to defend indigent persons accused of crime.” These three feature films, released theatrically, were part of a small group of prestige motion pictures produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s that legal historian David Papke and others have referred to as a “golden age” of Hollywood legal films. Papke points out that these films were popular and critical successes in their day and have justifiably come to be regarded as classics and even “exemplars for the standard pop cultural legal drama.” (“Law, Cinema, and Ideology: Hollywood Legal Films of the 1950s,” UCLA Law Review, Vol. 48 No. 6, 2001). http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/ucla/papke48.htm

This early period was also an evident “golden age” of legal drama for the Silver Gavels. Never again has there been a period of awards for feature films of the silver screen to rival 1958-1963. The Silver Gavels, of course, have continued to recognize legal drama. However, since the early 1960s, it’s been the “box” of the small screen—including series television and TV “movies”—that has been the primary vehicle for legal drama. Interestingly, both series television and TV movies have each had two heydays when it comes to Silver Gavels.

Let’s begin with network television series. The very first Silver Gavel for Television Drama went to Perry Mason in 1960. Still regarded as a classic series, albeit dated in sensibility almost to the point of camp, criminal defense attorney Mason notably never lost a case and invariably benefited from on-the-witness-stand confessions from the truly guilty. Apparently it was such a novelty for all concerned that, when the series received a Silver Gavel, Perry Mason himself—star Raymond Burr—picked up the Silver Gavel from ABA President John Randall. Into the 1960s, two episodes of the acclaimed Reginald Rose-created CBS television courtroom drama The Defenders, next received Silver Gavels (“Iron Man,” 1962; and “Blacklist,” 1964). Starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as dedicated father-and-son defense lawyers, The Defenders tackled tough social and legal issues of the day. Creator and writer Reginald Rose also wrote Twelve Angry Men, inspired by his own experience of jury service. In 1968 a Silver Gavel went for the “Commitment” episode of ABC’s Judd for the Defense (starring Carl Betz as a character inspired by real-life high-profile attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Percy Foreman)—“in which a dedicated lawyer remedies miscarriages of justice.” In 1971 a Silver Gavel was presented for an episode (“A Continual Roar of Musketry”) of the short-lived, but critically well regarded, NBC series, The Bold Ones: The Senator, starring Hal Holbrook as an idealistic Bobby Kennedy-like U.S. senator. That was a different era, wasn’t it? Tellingly, it would be 21 years before another Silver Gavel would be awarded for an episodic series television show. Enter Law & Order and a radically different sensibility and style from the 1960s depiction of noble lawyers pursuing noble causes of social justice.

 In 1992 Law & Order Executive Producer Dick Wolf received that series’ first of five Silver Gavels from ABA President Talbot (“Sandy”) D’Alemberte for the “Asylum” episode. “Asylum” was cited as a “compelling examination of the impact of homelessness on the criminal justice system.” In its standard format of half criminal investigation and half prosecution, characterized at its best by superb writing and stellar New York-based actors, Law & Order took on legal and social issues ripped from the headlines. Trademark sensibilities were a sense of big-city street “realism,” a near disdain for personal character development, a willingness not to shy away from ethical quandaries, and a sophisticated recognition that law and justice are not always coincident. Other L&O episodes earning Silver Gavels were “Intolerance” (1993), “House Counsel” (1996), “DWB” (1999), and “Hate” (2000). During this time, only one other network television drama was able to break Law & Order’s grip on the Silver Gavel—a distinctive cinema-verite-style episode of David E. Kelley’s The Practice (“Spirit of America,” 1998, lawyer Bobby Donnell and colleagues try to obtain a stay of execution for a man on death row). The 2000 “Hate” episode of Law & Order was the last time an episode of series television earned a Silver Gavel.

What about the periods before and after the 1990s-era heyday of Law & Order? These were eras of the dominance of what, in the 1970s, was often called the “movie of the week,” i.e., long-form, movie-length dramas released initially for television and never contemplated as feature films for general release in movie theaters. These TV movies were often prestige productions about serious topics. Prime examples were Fear on Trial, a CBS Movie of the Week that received the 1976 Silver Gavel. It tells the story of Austin, Texas radio show host John Henry Faulk and his successful lawsuit that effectively ended the Hollywood blacklist. Stars were William Devane as Faulk and George C. Scott as his attorney, Louis Nizer. A 1977 Silver Gavel went to Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, a dramatization of the famous 1930s case, which aired on NBC and starred Arthur Hill as Judge Horton. The Silver Gavel citation recognized the movie for “examining the responsibilities of judge and jury to effect a just verdict within the trial-by-jury system.”

Into the 1980s and 1990s such TV movies became less and less common on network television, ultimately dying out. The development of cable television in the 1990s and 2000s, however, provided a new platform for this genre, now described as “original movies” produced for television and often recruiting distinguished Hollywood veterans as key creatives. A prime example is Dirty Pictures, produced for the Showtime cable network. Winning the 2001 Silver Gavel for Television Drama, the Standing Committee on Gavel Awards commentary described it as a “compelling dramatization of the First Amendment furor generated by the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center’s 1990 exhibition” of the controversial photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Dirty Pictures was directed by Frank Pierson, the acclaimed Hollywood writer (Dog Day Afternoon, Cool Hand Luke) and former AMPAS (“Oscar”) president. Showtime won a second Silver Gavel in 2002 for The Killing Yard, a dramatization of the 1971 Attica, New York state prison revolt. More recently, Court TV won Silver Gavels for TV Drama for a trio of outstanding “original movies”: The Interrogation of Michael Crowe (2003), Chasing Freedom (2005), and The Exonerated (2006). With the possible exception of Chasing Freedom, a more discernibly fictionalized account about political asylum, all of these Silver Gavel award-winning movies, from both the 1970s and 2000s, are dramatizations of actual historical events. After producing The Exonerated, Court TV has evidently—and unfortunately—shut down its production of “original movies.” We can only hope this is not the end of a cycle of high-quality legal drama—or, if so, that new platforms and genres will emerge as video-based vehicles for legal drama as we approach the end of the first decade of the millennium and enter the 2010s.

 Learn more about the Silver Gavel Awards here. http://www.abanet.org/publiced/gavel/

 Howard Kaplan

 The views expressed in this posting are those of the author and have not been approved by the House of Delegates or the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed as representing the policy of the American Bar Association.