Legal Drama

A legal drama or a courtroom drama is a subgenre of drama and crime fiction. Law enforcement, crime, detective-based mystery solving, lawyer work, civil litigation, etc., are all possible focuses of legal dramas. Common subgenres of legal dramas include detective dramas, police dramas, courtroom dramas, legal thrillers, etc. Legal dramas appear in many forms of media, including novels, plays, television shows, and films. Legal drama sometimes overlap with crime drama, most notably in the case of Law & Order. Most crime drama focus on crime investigation and does not feature the court room. An early example of this overlapping form was Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason, in which the eponymous trial lawyer would usually defend his clients from their murder charges by investigating the crime before the trial, and dramatically revealing the actual perpetrator during the closing courtroom scene, by calling some other person to the stand and interrogating him or her into confessing in open court:

It is widely believed by most practicing lawyers that legal dramas result in the general public having misconceptions about the legal process. Many of these misconceptions result from the desire to create an interesting story. For example, conflict between parties make for an interesting story, which is why legal dramas emphasize the trial and ignore the fact that the vast majority of civil and criminal cases in the United States are settled out of court. Legal dramas also focus on situations where there is an obvious injustice or ones in which either the plaintiff or defendant is very interesting and unusual.

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