The Battle For The Soul Of This Country Will Be Fought In RomCom Parody Videos

The last administration made it fashionable to appoint federal judges that the legal community deems “not qualified,” the Supreme Court continues to eviscerate voting rights protections, we have local law enforcement winning prizes for violating the law, trial by combat is back, and — lest we forget — the Capitol was stormed by people refusing to accept the results of an election. And the commission set up to propose a solution to all this just kind of punted.

So it’s safe to say that the rule of law is in trouble in this country. We’ll lionize lawyers penning lengthy briefs submitted to nakedly political actors in robes and we’ll cheer analysts appearing on five-minute cable news hits to raise the alarm to partisan audiences killing time before the Bachelor comes back on, but maybe it’s time to consider that these avenues aren’t working.

Consider the situation in Poland, where the descent into authoritarianism is a little further up the track and lawyers have come to the conclusion that traditional stuffy lawyer tactics aren’t going to make a dent.

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So they’ve turned to parodies of romantic comedies. As one does.

The early films featured actors, entertainers and writers, from the host of The Voice of Poland, Barbara Kurdej-Szatan, to the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Some of the biggest hits starred the Wolne Sądy lawyers themselves: putting a legal twist on a scene from the Richard Curtis romcom Love Actually; playing children being given a nightmarish Christmas present; rapping about the constitution in a tribute to the Beastie Boys’ video parody of 1970s US cop shows, Sabotage.

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If you speak Polish, I’m sure these are a lot better, but this is still impressive:

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We’re just some lawyers, standing in front of a country, asking them not to slip into fascism.

Dismiss it as hokey if you want, but at some point lawyers need to come to grips with the fact that the system is going to keep backsliding (like Yale Law School!) until someone convinces the non-lawyers out there to care about what’s happening to the courts, even if that requires an approach that recognizes the value of pop culture in sugarcoating dire warnings. The group, Wolne Sądy (the Free Courts Foundation), picked up an award from the European Parliament for its efforts.

Anna Wójcik, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Science, said: “They were very innovative because they started communicating in a very attractive format to the general public. Of course you can say it’s attractive to people with certain tastes, living in urban areas … But they provided some accessible information about what is happening.”

Slavoj Žižek wrote all about this in one of his 85 million books. People put up a cognitive barrier when faced with factual recitations, but light up when presented with something they can emotionally place themselves in. Then he probably went on a lengthy aside about Slim Jims as a model for Marxist praxis because that’s how Žižek writes.

The point is, when faced with a crisis, these lawyers are thinking outside the box. What’s the American legal community planning to do? Another stern letter?

Lawyers turn to romcoms in fight for rule of law in Poland [The Guardian]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Topics

Courts, Poland, Rule of Law


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Originally posted on: https://abovethelaw.com/2021/11/the-battle-for-the-soul-of-this-country-will-be-fought-in-romcom-parody-videos/