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Adam Smith is revered as the father of modern economics. Analysis of his writings, however, reveals a profoundly medieval outlook. Smith is preoccupied with the need to preserve order in society. His scientific methodology emphasises reconciliation with the world we live in rather than investigation of it. He invokes a version of natural law in which the universe is a harmonious machine administered by a providential deity. Nobody is uncared for and, in real happiness, we are all substantially equal. No action is without its appropriate reward – in this life or the next. The social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the “invisible hand,” that is, the hand of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised.

Rough and tumble (R&T) play is a well-researched form of play fighting that contributes to children’s academic and social success. Some continue to believe it inevitably leads to bullying and aggression, but this chapter makes that case that R&T should be reconceptualized and supported by creating settings that welcome and encourage consenting players’ participation. R&T can be supported by creating an emotionally safe environment where children are empowered to choose whether or not to join in, by the provision of wide-open spaces, adequate time, and adults who will provide a physical and emotional safety net at arm’s length.

Various law and film scholars have noted that the judge occupies the place of a marginal figure in ‘legal cinema’ and in related scholarship. In this chapter I want to engage with the debate about the representation of the judge in film by way of an examination of a South African documentary, ‘Two Moms: A family portrait’ (2004). In the first instance this ‘family portrait’ appears to be neither an obvious candidate for inclusion in the canon of ‘legal cinema’ nor a film with a plotline dominated by a judge. But from this rather unpromising start this chapter explores how a film about an ordinary family made up of extraordinary people is an extraordinary film about law in general and about the figure of the judge in particular.

This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.

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.