More than any other figure in the Hollywood imagination, more even than the maverick cop, the lawyer embodies viewers' ambivalent attitudes toward the law. Ever since the American public became aware that “a distressing number of the Watergate villains, including the President, were lawyers,” disillusionment with lawyers as overpaid hairsplitters who ride roughshod over the truth in defense of their well-heeled and amoral clients has spawned a thousand late-night comedy monologues. When special prosecutor Kenneth Starr issued his historic report on President Clinton's alleged perjuries about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, each side was quick to attack the other's tactics as legalistic, as if the practice of law were itself contemptible. Recent movie lawyers have accordingly included Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) in The Devil's Advocate (1997), which makes explicit the widespread implication that lawyers are in league with the devil [Fig. 59], and Fletcher Reede (Jim Carrey) in Liar Liar (1997), which chooses a compulsively untruthful lawyer as the person who would be most comically hamstrung by his disappointed son's magically granted wish that he be forced to tell the truth for a single day.

Even as lawyers are universally vilified in the public imagination, they occupy a position of unprecedented popularity in American culture.