Friday, October 17 (OPENING NIGHT)—7:00 P.M.
WE ARE CURRENTLY AT CAPACITY.
David Boies
Renowned attorney who represented former Vice President Al Gore both before the Florida Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States in Bush v. Gore, the landmark case that ultimately decided the 2000 presidential election.
Ron Klain
Former chief-of-staff to Vice President Al Gore, and general counsel for the Gore-Lieberman Recount Committee.
Benjamin L. Ginsberg
Distinguished attorney who served as national counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign as well as national counsel to Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential campaign.
Abner Greene
Leonard F. Manning Professor of Law, Fordham Law School, and author of Understanding the 2000 Election: A Guide to the Legal Battles that Decided the Presidency (2001).
115 mins / directed by Jay Roach / USA / Unrated
A riveting depiction of the immediate aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the legal and political maneuverings and intrigues of Bush v. Gore, and the recount that never was. Both David Boies and Ron Klain were portrayed in this historically important and entertaining HBO film as passionate lawyers seeking to discover the truth of who actually won the 2000 election while, at the same time, ultimately forced to accept that sometimes politics has a way of influencing the way the law is understood and applied.
HBO Theater
15th floor
1100 Avenue of the Americas
NYC
Saturday, October 18—7:00 P.M.
Floyd Abrams
Author of Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment (2005) and renowned First Amendment attorney who represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers, along with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Time magazine in numerous other cases.
Nadine Strossen
Professor of Law at New York Law School, and author, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (1995). Since 1991, she has served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation's oldest and largest civil liberties organization.
111 mins / directed by Bob Fosse / USA / R
Dustin Hoffman stars in this groundbreaking film about Lenny Bruce, the supremely irreverent, inflammatory, and controversial 1960s comic who influenced a generation of stand-up comedians and whose groundbreaking and relentless style of social commentary was often deemed obscene by courtroom judges and caretakers of moral standards of decency. Long before George Carlin and Howard Stern, Lenny Bruce tested whether the First Amendment would protect a stand-up comedian whose material was arguably vulgar and yet managed to express ideas and raise serious political and social themes.
*McNally Amphitheatre
Fordham Law School
John Jay Osborn, Jr.
Novelist, The Paper Chase (1970)
William Michael Treanor
Dean of Fordham Law School and Paul Fuller Professor of Law
Professor Paul Bergman
Professor of Law, Emeritus, UCLA Law School, and co-author, Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies (2006).
113 mins / directed by James Bridges / USA / Unrated
When a first-year law student at Harvard Law School finally begins to gain confidence in the classroom, things quickly go awry when he discovers that he has been dating the daughter of the law school’s most fearsome professor. The film captures both the terror and romance (sometimes of the cerebral kind) that is often found during the first-year of law school, the daily pressures and the search for camaraderie and human connection, the utter madness that comes from over-stimulated minds, and the sheer amount of paper that must be read in order to chase down the elusive American dream.
*McNally Amphitheatre
Fordham Law School
David Jones
Film and theater director with numerous credits, including "The Confession."
David Black
Award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, producer, and screenwriter of "The Confession."
114 mins / directed by David Jones / USA / R
After his son is turned away from a hospital emergency room and dies, a father (Ben Kingsley) avenges his death by killing the three people who refused to provide treatment. A high-powered New York litigator (Alec Baldwin) with ambitions of becoming the next Manhattan District Attorney, is hired by the employer of the accused (who possesses knowledge that could be harmful to the employer) to plead guilty by reason of insanity. The father, however, refuses to plead that he was insane at the time that he took his revenge. The lawyer representing the accused must choose between his career ambitions and the moral search for the truth.
*McNally Amphitheatre
Fordham Law School
Wednesday, October 22—7:00 P.M.
Mark Harris
Author, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008). He writes a column for Entertainment Weekly and has also written on pop culture for several other publications, including The New York Times, Fortune, The Guardian, and Slate.
Alisa Solomon
Associate professor, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, cultural critic, and author, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (1997), and co-editor, The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater (2002).
125 mins / directed by Jonathan Demme / USA / R
Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a young, gay lawyer with AIDS who is fired from his conservative Philadelphia law firm because the partners fear that they might contract AIDS from him. With the help of a homophobic lawyer, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), Beckett decides to sue for unlawful termination. During the trial, as Beckett’s health deteriorates, Miller comes to admire his client’s courage and develops a true attorney-client relationship with the dying man. In a case plagued by animus and discrimination, Miller helps to vindicate the rights of his client and the truth of how prejudice had infected the corridors of a law firm.
*McNally Amphitheatre
Fordham Law School
Thursday, October 23—7:30 P.M.
Molly Haskell
Author and critic, was a long-time staff writer for The Village Voice, New York Magazine and Vogue. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, The Nation, Town & Country, The Guardian UK, The New York Observer and The New York Review of Books.
Daniel Kimmel
Film critic for Worcester Telegram and Gazette, among other publications, and author, I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies (2008), and DreamWorks, The Dream Team - The Rise and Fall of DreamWorks: Lessons from the New Hollywood (2006).
101 mins / directed by George Cukor / USA / Unrated
This classic courtroom comedy pits married lawyers against one another. Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) is the prosecutor; Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn) is defending a woman who tried to kill her philandering husband. Mr. Bonner expects a quick win. He doesn’t expect that his wife and fellow attorney, Amanda Bonner, will be defending the accused woman on the basis of "equal rights under the law," which Ms. Bonner insists would vindicate a man who would try to kill the lover of his unfaithful wife. Ms. Bonner demonstrates throughout the trial that men and women are treated differently under the law and in society, and that any person—man or woman—would resort to violence if pushed too far. Mr. Bonner, representing the state, insists that no individual can take the law into his or her own hands. As the tensions of the trial spill out of the courtroom and into the private, domestic lives of the battling attorneys, issues of justice and fairness abound in this feminist legal tale.
*McNally Amphitheatre
Fordham Law School
* James B.M. McNally Amphitheatre
Fordham Law School
140 West 62nd Street
New York City
