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The debate over ‘judicial activism’ has flourished in recent decades, but the term was in fact coined 70 years ago, by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The legal academy has bemoaned the term as perpetually ill-defined, but can this be attributed to its equivocal beginnings on the pages of Fortune magazine? This chapter investigates the circumstances in which the term was produced and the early meanings given to it in scholarly work. It is argued that there was very little effort on the part of legal academics and political scientists to gather a consensus as to definition, or otherwise to treat the terminology with caution, before the term was wrested from the university cloisters and captured by the popular media in the mid-1960s.

This chapter investigates the use of prospective (i.e., future oriented) narratives as rhetorical devices in public discourse. Drawing on recent narrative research and Northrop Frye's discussion of generic narrative forms in literature, I contrast the classic Romantic Narrative of America's occupation of Iraq presented in President Bush's State of the Union Addresses (SUAs) over the last 6 years of his presidency with the alternative narrative projected in the Democratic Party's formal responses to those addresses. My analysis demonstrates how Bush's story of America's actions in Iraq was constructed through the course of those speeches – by exploiting both narrative form and temporality – and how it constrained the articulation of counter narratives by the Democrats. The results support the general thesis that, by virtue of a neo-rhetoric centered around strategic frames and culturally resonant narratives, the Bush Administration in particular and conservatives in general successfully dictated public discourse on important national issues.

Anatomy of a Murder, a beloved, highly influential, seemingly liberal 1959 classic law-film seems to appropriate some of the fading western genre’s features and social functions, intertwining the professional-plot western formula with a hero-lawyer variation on the classic western hero character, America’s 19th century archetypal True Man. In so doing, Anatomy revives the western genre’s honor code, embracing it into the hero-lawyer law-film. Concurrently, it accommodates the development of cinematic imagery of the emerging, professional elite groups, offering the public the notion of the professional super-lawyer, integrating legal professionalism with natural justice. In the course of establishing its Herculean lawyer, the film constitutes its female protagonist as a potential threat, subjecting her to a cinematic judgment of her sexual character and reinforcing the honor-based notion of woman’s sexual-guilt.