Please join us for a presentation by Mark Phillips and Aryn Phillips titled, “The Media and America’s Fascination with Crime”
Date: February 15, 2018
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Location: University of California, Irvine campus, SBSG 1517
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
This event has been approved for a 1 hour MCLE credit.
Abstract:
It is increasingly evident that our modern obsession with violent crime in American culture is slaked by the media. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, total daily newspaper circulation in America was barely 2,000,000. By 1893, total newspaper circulation was still only 7,500,000. But by 1910, in only 17 years, that circulation had more than tripled to 25,000,000. Newspaper circulation requires grist for the mill. Sales depend upon lurid headlines and articles that catch the reader’s eye. As any watcher of nightly news knows, local violent crime and attendant trials lead the newscast, followed only distantly by sports, traffic, weather and the political events of a wide world forever teetering on the edge of famine, war and mutually assured destruction. What the Twentieth Century has proven is that an unrestrained media driven to sell newspapers, radio, television and internet ads will inevitably intrude on courts ill-equipped to insulate themselves from excess. Unrestrained, the press will threaten and cajole investigators, influence the courtroom behavior and tactics of lawyers and judges, and frighten jurors. Trials of the Century (Promethues Books, 2006) tells ten of these stories, one per decade, starting with Harry Thaw in 1906 and ending with O.J. Simpson in 1994. Each is a tale of celebrity and sex, prejudice and heartbreak, and how the arc of American justice is often pushed out of its trajectory of fairness by an insatiable media driven to sell copy.
Biography:
The authors are a father and daughter team in Oak Park, California.
Mark J. Phillips holds law degrees from UCLA and New York University. He has been practicing law for thirty-eight years with the Law Offices of Goldfarb, Sturman & Averbach in Encino, where he specializes in the fields of estate planning, trust and tax law, with certification as an expert by the California State Bar. In addition to the fulltime practice of law, he has been an adjunct professor for thirty years at the University of West Los Angeles College of Law, teaching Trusts & Estates, with hundreds of his students now practicing their profession in the community. In addition to being a regular speaker for numerous local bar and practice associations, he has for twenty years served as program lecturer for the National Business Institute, providing continuing education credit for attorneys, primarily in the subjects of estate planning, estate administration and ethics. In most years he gives more than one hundred hours of lectures to students and professionals, and is the author of more than a dozen scholarly articles in bar journals, primarily in the fields of ethics, trusts and estates.
Aryn Z. Phillips holds undergraduate degrees in history and international relations from Emory University and a Master’s degree (MPH) from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she focused on social and behavioral sciences. She is currently pursuing her Ph. D. in public health at the University of California at Berkeley
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