CBABC Recommends: Top 11 Must-Watch Law Movies

  • April 04, 2022

It’s always fun to watch your profession-to-be fictionalized. Here are 11 movies, in no particular order, that can provide law students a healthy dose of distraction from the struggles of studying.

My Cousin Vinny (Disney Plus)

This movie has “been praised by lawyers as one of the more realistic movies about the justice system and the lawyer profession, and certainly one of the most successful ones at drawing humor from a courtroom setting.”

Just Mercy (Netflix)

This movie, starring Michael B. Jordan, is a “great companion to the ongoing discussion regarding the death penalty, bringing a relevant and integral view to the topic.”

Legally Blonde (Amazon Prime)

Perhaps you were inspired to go to law school solely because of this movie. Legally Blonde stars Reese Witherspoon as the iconic Elle Woods, who rallies all her resources and gets into Harvard.

To Kill a Mockingbird (YouTube Movies)

This classic, set in Maycomb, Alabama in 1932, lives on through the book’s inclusion across school curriculums. Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer, defends a black man against an undeserved rape charge and his children against prejudice.

Devil’s Advocate (Amazon Prime)

Starring Keanu Reeves, Charlize Theron and Al Pacino, this lawyer film is “a fairly entertaining supernatural potboiler that finally bubbles over with a nearly operatic sense of absurdity and excess.”

Marshall (Netflix)

Chadwick Boseman portrays Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice, and focuses on one of the first cases of his career, the State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell. This movie “gives us an electrifying glimpse of a great man in the making.”

A Time to Kill (Amazon Prime)

A John Grisham special, this star-studded film including Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock “candidly tackles race relations in America.”

On the Basis of Sex (Netflix)

This movie follows young Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her early cases in the Supreme Court. The film is a “testament to the power and importance of the legal world’s unseen corners.”

The Pelican Brief (Netflix)

This thriller about a young law student whose legal brief about the assassination of two Supreme Court justices causes her to be targeted by killers is a “clever device that [takes] your mind off your problems for 141 minutes.”

Liar Liar (Netflix)

Starring Jim Carrey as a pathologically lying lawyer, all you have to do is trust that this movie has “several moments of inspired lunacy on display.”

A Civil Action (Disney Plus)

This legal thriller, based on a true story, stars John Travolta as a tenacious personal-injury lawyer involved in a case that threatens to destroy him.