The 12 Best Movies About Lawyers and/or Courtroom Dramas

 

12. Legal Eagles

Both Butch Cassidy and his partner, the Sundance Kid, went on to portray attorneys on screen. In the latter's case, Robert Redford's Tom Logan goes from Assistant District Attorney to defense lawyer after he gets mixed up with an unconventional fellow barrister and a frequent criminal suspect who swears she's innocent.  

11. Kramer vs. Kramer

When Ted Kramer's wife walks out on him and their five-year-old son, he's devastated -- and completely unprepared to be an instant single father. He has no idea how to do laundry, can't cook and is utterly unfamiliar with Billy's school schedule. Through much trial and much more error, Ted learns how to be a single parent and he and Billy forge an unshakable bond. He even sabotages his career (which results in his firing) so that he can devote more time to his little man.

Then, after having abandoned him for 15 months without making contact, Billy's mom shows up seeking full custody. What???

Naturally, the court grants custody to Ted's ex-wife. Initially planning to appeal the decision, Ted learns that Billy will probably be questioned on the stand and he decides that his son has been through enough.

10. To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird features Gregory Peck in his signature role -- Atticus Finch. The movie spans three years during which Atticus, a widower and single father, teaches his daughter and son to think for themselves and to not accept the casual but rampant racism that pervades their 1930s Alabama town.

9. A Few Good Men

A Few Good Men represented headliner Tom Cruise's first time portraying an attorney -- as well as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's first time writing a courtroom drama (the film was adapted from his play of the same name). Co-star John M. Jackson would go on to portray another naval officer, Rear Admiral A.J. Chegwidden, on television's long-running JAG (and NCIS: Los Angeles) -- which primarily focused on naval and marine lawyers and their cases. 

The story focuses on first-year Harvard-educated naval Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, whose assigned to defend a pair of Marines accused of killing a fellow jarhead during a hazing incident while the three were posted at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

8. The Trial of the Chicago 7

Writer Aaron Sorkin pens another legal drama but this time he directs as well.

7. The Mauritanian

6. The Verdict

His law career scraping the bottom of the barrel and he himself regularly hitting the bottom of the bottle, ambulance-chaser Frank Galvin catches a lucky break when he's handed a big-money case. But after learning the extent and circumstances of the victim's injuries, he determines to expose the corruption that caused them, rather than settle.

5. Just Mercy

Just Mercy is the film adaptation of attorney Bryan Stevenson's critically-acclaimed 2014 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, featuring Jordan in the central role. Focusing primarily on Stevenson's attempts to free a wrongfully-convicted African-American man sentenced to the death penalty in Monroeville, Alabama, Just Mercy is a rarity among Hollywood movies about racism -- a savior film that features Black people being saved by a Black person. The movie highlights the astounding level of institutional racism within the Alabama (and American) justice system -- which persists to this day. Some moviegoers may initially have trouble comprehending the magnitude of the problem and believing the extraordinary lengths to which those in power went in order to uphold a system of oppression.

Interestingly enough, director Destin Daniel Cretton strongly indicts the caucasian male members of the communities involved. But though history tells a different story, the movie goes out of its way to absolve white women of any complicity in connection to the systemic racism that it depicts.

A courtroom drama that outshines genre favorites like A Few Good Men, A Time to Kill, Primal Instinct and Philadelphia, Just Mercy rivals To Kill a Mockingbird. Ironically, the author of the book on which that movie was based, Harper Lee, was a native of Monroeville.

The movie begins with the 1987 arrest of Monroeville entrepreneur Walter McMillian, whose accused of murdering a local 18-year-old white woman, Ronda Morrison. After moving to Alabama and finding local commercial property owners reluctant to rent to an advocate for Death Row inmates, Harvard Law grad and Delaware native Stevenson moves in with the family of Eva Ansley, a local woman horrified by the Alabama justice system's mistreatment of poor defendants.

Initially refusing to work with the young attorney due to his previous lawyer's ineptitude, McMillian finally comes around following Stevenson's acceptance by his family and community.

McMillian eventually reveals that he was transported to Death Row immediately after his arrest, where he remained for more than a year before his trial. He was also at a fish fry attended by several witnesses, one of whom was a police officer, during the time of the murder. He was targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system not merely because he was African-American but because he was an African-American man who'd engaged in a public affair with a white woman.

In the absence of any physical evidence, the state's case depended entirely on witness testimony. And the primary witness, career criminal Ralph Myers, was indicted as a co-conspirator and offered a 30-year sentence in lieu of the death penalty in exchange for his testimony. Following the trial judge's decision to relocate the proceedings to a nearby overwhelmingly white county, McMillian was convicted by 11 white (with one African-American) jurors and sentenced to life in prison. Unsatisfied, the presiding judge set the jury's sentence aside and imposed the death penalty.

Stevenson's fight to secure McMillian's freedom even included a segment on 60 Minutes.

Onscreen, Stevenson endures police intimidation, legal stonewalling and reluctance to come forward on the part of witnesses to obtain justice for just one client. Would you believe he's gone on to save 125 men from death sentences?

Just Mercy should be required viewing, particularly for those concerned with the need for criminal justice reform.

4. My Cousin Vinny

Vincent Gambibi's very first trial is held far away from his Brooklyn stomping grounds. And it just happens be a murder case. 

3. Marshall

Thurgood Marshall made history in 1967 when he became the very first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice. But the film that bears his name is set much earlier in the legal pioneer's career. Marshall takes place in 1940 and 1941 when a then 33-year-old Marshall, portrayed by Boseman, was still a practicing attorney employed by the NAACP. The movie focuses on his involvment in the State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell case. The case centered on a white woman, Eleanor Strubing, who accused her African-American chauffeur, Spell, of rape, kidnapping and attempted murder. Because the presiding judge, Carl Foster (a friend of prosecutor Lorin Willis' family), prohibited Marshall from speaking in the courtroom, he teamed with local, caucasian insurance attorney Samuel Friedman (in reality, Friedman was hired because it was believed that the white jury would more readily identify with him than with Marshall). Under Marshall's guidance, Friedman's cross-examination of Strubing exposed inconsistencies in her story. It was ultimately revealed in court that she and Spell had engaged in consensual sex and that Strubing made the false accusation out of fear that her extramarital liason with a Black man might be exposed by an accidental pregnancy. After more than 12 hours of deliberation, Spell was acquitted by the all-white jury, eliciting audible gasps in the courtroom.

Marshall retired in 1991, 16 months before his death, and was consequently succeeded by Clarence Thomas. Fifty-two years after Marshall's appointment, Thomas, who still sits on the Supreme Court bench, is the last African-American justice to join the court.

2. Hart's War

While Saving Private Ryan highlights (among other things) why WWII was so personal for Jewish soldiers, Hart's War explores the predicament in which African-American soldiers found themselves -- unwelcome by enemy combatants and American servicemen alike.

When two pilots and members of the famed Tuskegee Airmen are shot down near a Nazi prison camp -- Stalag 6A -- they are soon subjected to at least as much hostility and disrespect from the white American POWs as from their German captors. Denied the deference due to officers (both pilots are second lieutenants), one, Lamar T. Archer, is shot to death by the guards after being framed with a weapon. The other, Lieutenant Lincoln A. Scott, is accused of murdering a fellow-prisoner -- Staff Sergeant Vic Bedford (who framed Archer).

When the camp commandant, Colonel Oberst Werner Visser, agrees to allow the Americans to convene their own court-martial of Scott, Colonel William McNamara, the highest-ranking American prisoner, fully intends to do everything in his power to insure the trial lasts as long as possible and ends in a guilty verdict. Such a verdict would call for a sentence of death -- to be carried out by Visser's men. Under the colonel's direction, the Americans have been slowly and painstakingly tunneling out of the camp and the hope is that the legal proceedings will serve to distract the Germans.

All of the events are seen through the eyes of officer's aide, First Lieutenant Thomas Hart, who was captured driving a Jeep near the Battle of the Bulge -- the last major offensive by the Germans, during which at least 19,000 Americans were killed. Because Hart attended Yale law school for two years before joining the Army, he's drafted by McNamara to defend Scott. The idea is that the inexperienced Hart can't possibly win. Meanwhile, Visser supplies Hart with the U.S. Army manual on court-martials as a means to antagonize McNamara.

Hart's War is a mystery story as well as a war movie so I won't give away the ending for those who have yet to see it. 

1. Sicario

Sicario is one of the Spanish words for assassin. While Traffic presented the War on Drugs from various angles and perspectives, Sicario gives the POV of one FBI agent who gets caught up in it up to her eyeballs and may not make it back out. The movie also provides insight into the hazy legalities involved in fighting the "war".