Teaching Film by Patrice Petro

Author:Patrice Petro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Modern Language Association of America
Published: 2013-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Resources

Doing social science research may be daunting to the humanist. But, in many ways, the tools for doing this kind of research are more advanced than those available for doing research in the humanities: the databases of both scholarship and primary material are extremely rich and well developed. When researching law and policy, you need to leave your chair and computer even less frequently than when researching film history or theory.

Many works of film history mention key pieces of legislation or landmark court decisions. There is a smaller body of work that focuses directly on film law and policy. The scholars Thomas Guback, Dallas Smythe, Douglas Gomery, Kristin Thompson, Ian Jarvie, Patricia Aufderheide, Albert Moran, and Toby Miller, among others, have written and edited significant books that look at national or global film policy. Many more books look at the impact of policy on national film industries, largely because, since the late 1930s, the film industries of all but a few countries have relied on direct government subsidies.

Much more research on film and related policies exist beyond the usual boundaries of the field. The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is an online repository that scholars use to upload work on law and policy, among other subjects. SSRN and its contents are freely available on the Web, and authors often post working drafts as well as preprint versions of their work. LexisNexis is a one-stop venue for legal scholarship, news, and primary documents that allows users to search law review articles and legal and policy news items and retrieve cases by party name, citation, or keywords. The Westlaw Database also has cases and secondary literature, including many valuable legal treatises. Several databases contain a wealth of material on the history of film and media policy and law. JSTOR is a terrific resource for historical law journal articles, and HeinOnline collects a wide range of historical legal scholarship and documents. The less widely available The Making of Modern Law collects British and US treatises from 1800 to 1926 as well as US Supreme Court records from 1832 to 1978.

Not every institution will give every library patron access to every legal database. Court decisions, in particular, can be hard to find, despite the fact that they are government works and part of the public domain. Fortunately, many legal resources are freely available, and more and more court decisions are being made freely available on the Web as well. Yale Law School’s Curiae hosts US Supreme Court cases and briefs. Oyez also collects recordings of recent Supreme Court arguments. Listening to the dizzying barrage of questions from the justices often reveals the key issues at stake in a case, and the audio can be a welcome addition to text-heavy syllabi. FindLaw is not as comprehensive or easy to use as LexisNexis or Westlaw, but it does make some cases and articles available for free. AltLaw is also working to bring all US case law to the Web for free. The Library of Congress’s Thomas database is an invaluable resource that makes legislative material freely available.

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