Boston Legal Portrays the Real McCoy While The Office Is a Liability Petri Dish

Posted by Alan Childress

Continuing my apparent theme this week of lawyers in popular culture and media portrayals -- from John Adams to TV ads to Law & Order -- I note that, yesterday in the California Blog of Appeal, Ventura appellate ace Greg May posted that the show Boston Legal this week featured Supreme Court lookalikes and real Justice names in an "oral argument."  He cites and links the Harmful Error Blog as providing a YouTube video of the hot bench and the comment that this is "fairly amazing."  I wonder if Justice Thomas asked any questions.  I am pretty sure no lawyer from Loyola-Marymount answered "Nope" to Justice Scalia or suggested to him that reading case law before the argument might make one's head hurt so was to be avoided. 

Greg also links his prior post on a blogger-lawyer (Atlanta's Julie Elgar) who watches The Office to tally up all the liability events in each episode.  That could be more daunting than keeping up with the card count with Kevin Spacey in 21.  [21?  Not 22?  That explains it!]  Elgar's intro to last week's episode is a tad surprising and not particularly comforting:

Despite what you might think, Michael’s demand that all employees provide him with candidates to serve as the mother of his children does not violate any major employment law.

I did guess right on this one:

That being said, allowing managers to require their subordinates to act as match-makers as a term and condition of their continued employment isn’t a good idea.