Excellent article.

We are talking about lawyers here. They are not as other men.

Calm down; it's only a film...

Can't we say the same about male leads in a lot of movies like that?
I mean they struggle with bad relationships or are single or have other problems just as much.
Seems that a movie about a man or a woman who has it all together seems a bit boring.

I know what you are trying to say and you probably have a point but your examples arent very good. Julia Roberts in the Pelican Brief wasn't lying in bed thinking the time was ticking away, she was just a student. And in the Erin Brockovich, she was a single mum struggling to provide for her family. Somehow I dont feel those examples portray the picture you paint.

what has an article on female roles in US lawyer films got to do with a bbc tv series ?

and Gareth Peirce is a brilliant solicitor....not a barrister.

@justagirl25 - totally agree, particularly with your first para. That was what made Sam Mendes' Away We Go stand out last year - a film about a normal, happy couple. Although even there, the adventures were all about meeting other dysfunctional couples.

Not sure if we can really blame the film makers. I mean, I'm very happy in my life - happily married, perfectly good job - but I accept that a film about it would be rather boring. My mum might like it... :-)

You illustrate the piece with a shot of Glenn Close, whose role as lawyer Patty Hewes in the brilliant DAMAGES is way more up-to-date than any of the examples mentioned, and sets the bar for the next 'female lawyer show' to come along.

Except that DAMAGES is hardly a 'female lawyer show' with obligatory work/home issues and putdowns by male colleagues.. Close has as complex and empowered as a dramatic role as any actor can hope to get, on TV or anywhere.

Well this really is the cutting edge of feminism - you can forget about migrant outworkers, rape crisis centres or men failing to cough up with their child support payments- what we REALLY should be worrying about is whether fictnal characters are being played in a balanced manner.

In my professional experience the last thing you want to do is portray the reality of women lawyers- unless you want a pandemic of narcolepsy among viewing audiences.

Does this mean Ally McBeal wasn't at all true to life?

Lovely picture of Jeff Bridges.

This a good article with some interesting points. The majority of people in law now are women; I am sitting in a department of a solictors offices now, housing 20 people, 17 of which are women.

However, I think it is worth noting that barristers and solicitors lead different working life-styles. Barristers are generally self-employed, having the ability to pick and choose when they work. Whereas some solicitors work up to 80 hours a week, obviously giving them hardly any time to themselves, fitting the description of this said 'lonely' barrister.

The key point is that a barrister doesn't have to work 80 hours a week and live a lonely and depressing life if they don't want to.

Anyone who wants a profession in law should expect to work grueling hours as to make it to the upper heights of law.

@mintslice

The law site does not forget about other debates. It covers a wide range of issues of interest to feminist lawyers, including representational ones. See here and here and here and here and here if you would like some recent examples.

Thanks Natalie - i wasnt really criticising the coverage in your excellent newspaper, but the lengths to which some folk will go for an "angle".

I mean, really.

One day someone might do some groundbreaking research into whether people just watch the telly to be entertained?

Meanwhile, Ill stick with Glenn Close in "Damages" - who, funnily enough, isnt too far off the sociopaths Ive actually dealt with in the legal profession (although Glenn has much better lines).

The often underrated Laura Linney was an excellent opponent for Richard Gere in Primal Fear. She was nearly strangled by the amazing Edward Norton, who should have won the Oscar for Supporting Actor.

@mintslice I don't know ... I'm quite convinced by research that suggests what people watch on the telly - or read in newspapers - can impact on their views, maybe even actions. If legal dramas/films endlessly show women in a certain way, won't that colour what people think of the reality, even if we're not so gullible as to consciously believe everything we see/read. Also, it's annoying! I watch the telly to be entertained, but sometimes it's so frustrating to see boring - and, yes, even damaging - stereotypes played out again and again.

"The key point is that a barrister doesn't have to work 80 hours a week and live a lonely and depressing life if they don't want to."

They do if they want to eat. Especially since they only get what solicitors pay them, which is a very meagre slice of a depressingly small pie.

I'm not looking forward to this series - sounds more like Cavanaugh out of "Amour, Gloire, Beaute" than anything else, especially with all the healthy shagging to establish she's not just a spinster with a vocation. What I'd really like is, well, reality - more like a hard-working and chronically underpaid Mrs. Rumpole than anything else. Mind you, the new heroine must be in commercial law if she's going for silk in her 30s. I've heard that silk is a bit of a disaster, income-wise,

the BBC promised that its new legal drama series Silk would present a true-to-life portrait of a female barrister applying for QC or "silk".

Pardon me, but the idea of some drama being derived from whether or not someone is made a QC, is calculated to send me off to sleep

After all, being made a QC is a blatantly self-serving distinction for (almost exclusively) barristers. Basically it gives you the right to charge double ordinary fees, and to provide ludicrous opinions to whoever needs to pay for it, on the basis that as it was from a silk, it must be right.

There are good QCs but there are also some that are falling-down alcoholics, domestic violence abusers, sexual harrassers, and puffed-up, arrogant so and sos. Some of them I wouldnt trust to go on an errand to buy a paper at the local shop.

As a QC, the title is not subject to any continuing accreditation so you can exploit it to make money and prosper as much as you like

Now a series that exposed the truth, and featured an ethical lawyer, battling the powers that be in the system, against the public school boys club it is.....not that would be worth watching.

not this dross

the BBC promised that its new legal drama series Silk would present a true-to-life portrait of a female barrister applying for QC or "silk".

Pardon me, but the idea of some drama being derived from whether or not someone is made a QC, is calculated to send me off to sleep

After all, being made a QC is a blatantly self-serving distinction for (almost exclusively) barristers. Basically it gives you the right to charge double ordinary fees, and to provide ludicrous opinions to whoever needs to pay for it, on the basis that as it was from a silk, it must be right.

There are good QCs but there are also some that are falling-down alcoholics, domestic violence abusers, sexual harrassers, and puffed-up, arrogant so and sos. Some of them I wouldnt trust to go on an errand to buy a paper at the local shop.

As a QC, the title is not subject to any continuing accreditation so you can exploit it to make money and prosper as much as you like

Now a series that exposed the truth, and featured an ethical lawyer, battling the powers that be in the system, against the public school boys club it is.....now that would be worth watching.

not this dross

I can assure you a good barrister gets paid enough money to eat, without working 80 hours a week.

I agree with peejaytee, some barristers are nice, but the majority are arrogant, narcissistic, ignorant and socially unaware fools. I like your ideas on what you'd like to see. It sounds very reminiscent to a Mr Michael Mansfield QC's rise and success.

"some barristers are nice, but the majority are arrogant, narcissistic, ignorant and socially unaware fools"

And you know this because you're not a barrister?

I'm not Albert Einstein - would you like my opinion of theoretical physicists? They are immensely wealthy, live in country estates called Wayne Manor, and spend hours and hours in an underground lab creating Red Kryptonite.

I know this because I spend a lot of time with barristers - unfortunately

Bring back Rumpole.

Single female lawyer, fighting for her clients
Wearing sexy mini skirts and being self-reliant
Says it all, really.

loftwork, are you quite serious? By what standard are barristers struggling to make ends meet?

it was foolish of the BBC to hold up "true to life" as a stick with which to beat this show, and to give this reheated polemic some currency.

As a screenwriter I draw from life but bottom line my job is to entertain, not set the world to rights.

"By what standard are barristers struggling to make ends meet?"

By the same standard that results in most of them dropping out during their first 5 years of Call. Commercial barristers are better paid than their criminal colleagues. Most criminal barristers would make more as plasterers.

The myth that all barristers are wealthy is just that - a myth. But it serves government well - squeeze the life out of Legal Aid because nobody cares whether criminal advocates can survive on it. Eventually we'll have a US style system with Public Defenders and all the justice money can buy.

I just hope Silk includes a plenty of probate, conveyancing and ambulance chasing so it truly represents the reality of female lawyers and indeed the legal profession at large.

Let's hope Silk also portrays the applicant as a well-connected Party animal, or else she can forget it until she's pushing 50, if then.

Just-a-girl makes an interesting point. But here's what I've found--before the 1980s-1990s Hollywood production of a slew of women-in-law films (some not strictly lawyers), male lawyers in film may have been conflicted, but, in the end, they pretty much were heroic savers-of-the-day (or of the "right side" when it came to the issues at stake [To Kill a Mockingbird, Knock on any Door, Witness for the Prosecution, Anatomy of a Murder]). Their mission and the institution of the law were very much in synch. It was after the surge of women-in-law films that male lawyers had more trouble (Presumed Innocent, The Firm, Primal Fear, The Rainmaker, A Civil Action). As several people pointed out--why would we want films about men or women in law without drama and conflict? That would be a snoozer. But there is a difference in terms of how male and female protagonists are "positioned" in relationship to that conflict. Rarely, for instance, do women "speak" in voice over as figures of authority in the 1980s and 1990s women-in-law films, but many of the male lawyers in that era do--just a subtle way in which they are "granted" a narrative power and a power derived from language (linked so closely to the law). In some movies like Suspect and Defenseless, the female protagonist is displaced in her position as main character by a man who either must assist or must save her. Just as the legal system marginalizes her, so too, then, does the narrative system.

True as one reader points out--all examples don't fit the larger pattern--and I wouldn't claim they do. Yet even in Erin Brokovich we have a dedicated woman who becomes an activist, and the drama tends to place as much or more emphasis on the personal sacrifice involved and the guilt it induces--particularly centered on her role as mum. Nothing wrong with that , really, but how many times have you seen a man-in-law film in which the male protagonist, after working tirelessly for a good cause, bursts into tears when he is told that his baby spoke his first words and Dad wasn't there to hear it? He's not supposed to feel guilty about such things but a woman professional somehow is. And we are positioned to accept that as natural, which just goes to show how we and the stories we produce are very much products of our culture and the system of "laws" that govern it.

Another reader makes the excellent point that maybe this is all a little simplistic and very much less important than issues of poverty and rape, for instance. Yet somehow get a sense of why women as rape victims may have such a hard time of it in the legal system when we begin to look at the way stories about law are told and ways in which they mediate--even indirectly-- and naturalize already existing structures of power.

I vaguely remember watching North Square, made by the people involved in the new drama"Silk"; it was ok, and starred Rupert Penry-Jones, who is in the new show. I suppose it will be a derivative crowd pleaser, but it would be daft to speculate on a show which hasn`t aired yet. I hope that there will be some good roles for women in it.