The Fordham Law Film Festival gets underway this week with a number of fabulous films.
We open with a documentary about school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas fifty years ago and the way in which the same high school has progressed, or regressed, in its present student body racial makeup and overall achievement and white and African-American students.
On Saturday, we learn about Shakespeare’s Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice,” and what was really behind his demand of a “pound of flesh.” Why would a money lender want human flesh as satisfaction of a debt if he was offered triple damages if he would simply accept the money and drop his lawsuit?
On Sunday, Alan Dershowitz discusss the moral comprises of a defense attorney who may have actually defended a guilty man, in “Reversal of Fortune,” based on Dershowitz’s own book that detailed his experience in this actual case.
Everyone’s favorite lawyer and father, Atticus Finch, is screened at Fordham on Tuesday night when we show “To Kill a Mockingbird,” featuring the daughter of the film’s star, Gregory Peck. Cecilia Peck will be joined by film critic Stuart Klawans and federal judge John Keenan.
On Wednesday radical lawyer Ron Kuby and Vanity Fair writer David Margolick discuss the legal thriller, “True Believer,” and root for a lawyer who chooses to take on a lost cause because, well . . . he’s a true believer.
Thursday the Festival comes to a close with “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” as New York Times legal affairs correspondent, Adam Liptak, and Norman Siegel, the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union discuss how the First Amendment is invoked to defend even the most obscene among us.
