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John Henry Faulk was a popular radio and television personality during the McCarthy era. He was host of his own radio program on WCBS in New York when he publicly challenged AWARE, Inc., an ultrapatriotic group engaged in the systematic blacklisting of entertainment personalities. In response, an AWARE bulletin accused Faulk himself of subversive associations. Angry and frightened by this accusation, Faulk brought suit against AWARE, charging conspiracy to libel him and to destroy his career. Thus began one of the great civil rights cases of the twentieth century.

John Henry Faulk recounts the story of this harrowing time in Fear on Trial, the dramatic account of his six years on the "blacklist"—an exile that began with the AWARE bulletin and ended with his vindication by a jury award of $3,500,000—the largest libel award in U.S. history at that time. The heart of the book is the trial of Faulk's libel action against AWARE, in which attorney Louis Nizer relentlessly exposed the blacklist for what it was—a cynical disdain of elementary decency couched in the rhetoric of patriotism.

Many of the people involved in the Faulk case were and are famous: attorneys Nizer and Roy Cohn; Edward R. Murrow and Charles Collingwood; Myrna Loy, Kim Hunter, Tony Randall, and Lee Grant; J. Frank Dobie; Ed Sullivan, David Susskind, and Mark Goodson. But the hero is Faulk himself, a man who—in the words of Studs Terkel—"faced the bastards and beat them down."

As real women increasingly entered the professions from the 1970s onward, their cinematic counterparts followed suit. Women lawyers, in particular, were the protagonists of many Hollywood films of the Reagan-Bush era, serving as a kind of shorthand reference any time a script needed a powerful career woman. Yet a close viewing of these films reveals contradictions and anxieties that belie the films' apparent acceptance of women's professional roles. In film after film, the woman lawyer herself effectively ends up "on trial" for violating norms of femininity and patriarchal authority.

In this book, Cynthia Lucia offers a sustained analysis of women lawyer films as a genre and as a site where other genres including film noir, maternal melodrama, thrillers, action romance, and romantic comedy intersect. She traces Hollywood representations of female lawyers through close readings of films from the 1949 Adam's Rib through films of the 1980s and 1990s, including Jagged Edge, The Accused, and The Client, among others. She also examines several key male lawyer films and two independent films, Lizzie Borden's Love Crimes and Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions. Lucia convincingly demonstrates that making movies about women lawyers and the law provides unusually fertile ground for exploring patriarchy in crisis. This, she argues, is the cultural stimulus that prompts filmmakers to create stories about powerful women that simultaneously question and undermine women's right to wield authority.