Books, Movies

What Jar Jar Can Teach Us About Free Speech

A long time ago in a con law classroom far far away...

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StarWarsSunsteinIt’s hard to take any discussion about Star Wars seriously when the author has anything positive to say about the greenscreen abortions that were the infamous prequels.[1] There’s a burgeoning hipster spirit contending that we all fail to understand the daring genius of these films. Unfortunately, just because something is so mainstream it’s a cliché doesn’t actually make it untrue. That Disney managed to hire some actually competent people to make entertaining television shows set in the time of the prequels does not successfully transform Lucas’s bantha poodoo into good films.

And yet, Cass Sunstein manages to pull it off in his latest book, The World According To Star Wars (affiliate link). While, in reality, the prequels were as brilliant as a neck tourniquet, one can forgive Sunstein this wild error in judgment because he needs the prequels to make many of his main points about how the films — a modern, quintessentially American, mythology — can inform our understanding of social movements and constitutional law.

What can the prequels possibly add to a discussion on constitutional law? Sunstein borrows a bit from Ronald Dworkin to argue that the prequels and how they ultimately fit into the series demonstrate the folly of originalism in crafting law informed by the past, but meant to shape what comes after.

Nonetheless, an understanding of the Star Wars saga does tell us a fair bit about constitutional law — not in terms of its content, but in terms of how it gets created, and the kinds of freedom and constraints that judges have. In short: Constitutional law is full of”I am your father” moments — twists and turns, reversals, unanticipated choices, seeds and kernels that launch whole new narratives. Judges are authors of episodes, facing a background that they are powerless to change. But they are nonetheless able to exercise a lot of creativity.

He declines to discuss droid liberation or label racist stereotype Jar Jar Binks as the Dred Scott of this analogy about constitutional jurisprudence, but maybe that’s because, despite his protestations to the contrary, he believes that Jar Jar is really a sinister genius.

Indeed, aren’t the prequels precisely the problem with a legal system evolving, to borrow Dworkin’s term, as a “chain novel”? Try as we might, we can never undo the stain of finding out that the Force is just a parasitic infection or that Anakin is clumsily cast as Space Jesus so George Lucas can force feed one more mythological reference down our throats? To take Sunstein’s project a step further, doesn’t this highlight the role critical legal studies and/or critical race theory plays in constitutional law to the extent these academic efforts seek to uncover how foundational errors can poison the whole endeavor? Even after the films chose to downplay “the Force as blood disease,” we cannot unlearn that the Force is meant as a mark of genetic supermen and women. And as much as Sunstein asserts that the movies exalt democracy, this master race of Force sensitives claimed First Estate status in the Old Republic as a matter of divine right.

Wow, this series really is a rich jumping off point to discuss the law.

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Alas, law and politics do not dominate the book, which transitions from providing a history lesson on the making of the films, to an extended discussion of the behavioral psychology of groups, to meditations on fathers and sons. Indeed the scope of the book is so broad that its insights can feel rushed in its 182 pages. Most audiences will enjoy the survey of so many topics, but the law student in me wanted the chapter about con law to go on much longer and in much more depth. Perhaps there’s a law review article in the offing where Sunstein can stretch his legs on these issues.

Still, that’s a weak criticism for a book that tries to use one (admittedly decades-spanning) film series as a jumping off point for so many interdisciplinary issues. The World According To Star Wars is a great read for any fan of the Star Wars films and a thought-provoking invitation to lawyers and non-lawyers alike to understand that all the arguments and interpretations we place upon these films mirror the nature of constitutional interpretation complete with its own foundational text with just the right amount of openness to incite argument over original intent, legislative history, canon, apocrypha, and conspiracy theory.

Just another way the movies are quintessentially American. And I don’t care if that was Lucas’s original intent.

Earlier: Slave Wars

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Joe Patrice is an 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.

[1] For more, just watch these. Or read A.O. Scott’s review of the most loathsome of the prequels:

“Attack of the Clones” is many things — a two-hour-and-12-minute action-figure commercial, a demo reel heralding the latest advances in digital filmmaking, a chance for gifted actors to be handsomely paid for delivering the worst line readings of their careers — it is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.

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