Law on Film

This episode examines a case that sits at the uneasy boundary between criminal adjudication, media power, and moral authority: the prosecution and execution of Aileen Wuornos, labeled the “first female serial killer. We look at two documentaries by Nick Broomfield—Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)—alongside the feature film Monster (2003), written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Charlize Theron in an Oscar-winning role. Broomfield’s documentaries are less about guilt or innocence than about process: who controls the narrative, how legal representation operates, and what happens when a defendant’s life becomes an object of transaction, between lawyers, media, and the public. The films also penetrate the issues around the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the problems that arise when the state seeks to executive individuals who are themselves victims and suffer from severe mental illness. Monster  approaches the same facts through dramatization. It also raises important questions, including how far context should matter in judging criminal responsibility and construction of narratives around crimes.
Timestamps:
0:00   Introduction
2:58   Capturing law on film
5:24   The two Nick Broomfield documentaries
11:16   Addressing Aileen Wuornos’s murders
14:04  The flawed defense strategy
18:47  The depiction of Tyria Moore (Aileen Wuornos’s girlfriend
20:55  Selling the Aileen Wuornos story
23:09  The theme of the “monster”
28:29  Themes of betrayal and self-defense
31:53   Nick Broomfield and an outsider view of the American legal system
34:56  Mental illness and the death penalty
37:39  Media coverage of sensational murders 
39:22  Failures of the legal process
44:26  A critique of the death penalty
47:00  Exoticization in the films

Further Reading: 
Cavanaugh, L. Sheila, “‘White Trash:’ Abject Skin in Film Reviews of ‘Monster’,” in Skin, Culture, and Pscyhoanalysis (Cavanaugh, L. Sheila et al. eds.) (2013)
Dargis, Manohla, “Life and Death Issues,” Los Angeles Times (Jan. 9. 2004)
Diamond, Suzanna, “‘A Flower in a Hard Rain’: Melodramatic Storytelling by, and About, Aileen Wuornos,” Anthurium, vol. 15(2) (2019)
Horeck, Tanya, “From Documentary to Drama: Capturing Aileen Wuornos,” Screen, vol. 48(2), pp. 141-59 (Summer 2007)
Pearson, Kyra, “The Trouble with Aileen Wuornos, Feminism’s ‘First Serial Killer,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 4(3), pp. 256-75 (Sept. 2007
Smith, Abbe, “The ‘Monster’ in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators,” 38 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 367 (2005)

Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at [email protected]
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024) is Russian-language American documentary film written and directed by Julia Loktev (with co-director Anna Nemzer). The film describes the effort to maintain press freedoms in Putin’s Russia in the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The documentary provides an intimate portrait of independent Russian journalists—mainly young women—who risk everything to pursue truth and accountability amidst escalating repression under the Putin regime. Filmed in late 2021 and early 2022, the documentary captures how the legal machinery of censorship, surveillance, and state-harassment converged to crush internal dissent and incapacitate civil society. It not only provides a profoundly disturbing account of what has occurred in Russia but also serves as a broader warning about the fragility of press freedoms and in a time of rising authoritarianism worldwide. 
Timestamps:
0:00      Introduction
2:45       How the film came about
5:25       A primer on Russian censorship and repression
15:15      “Foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations”
23:32     Social marginalization through the creation of an enemies list 
28:46     State persecution of TV Rain and other independent media 
32:45     The manipulation of language
36:30     Identifying the pivotal moment 
43:36     How the film captures the elimination of press freedoms
48:26     Courts and lawyers
53:27     The Kremlin’s public mobilization to support the war in Ukraine
58:53     Independent journalism in exile
1:02:17   Parallels to the United States under Trump
Further reading:
Chang, Justin, “‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I’ Is a Staggering Portrait of Russian Journalists in Dissent,” New Yorker (Aug. 14, 2025)
Edel, Anastasia, “Putin vs. the Press,” Foreign Policy (Oct. 3, 2025)
Human Rights Watch, Russia’s Legislative Minefield: Tripwires for Civil Society Since 2020 (2024)
Human Rights Watch, Disrupted, Throttled, and Blocked State Censorship, Control, and Increasing Isolation of Internet Users in Russia (2025)
Krupskiy, Maxim, “The Impact of Russia’s ‘Foreign Agents’ Legislation on Civil Society,” Fletcher Russia & Eurasia Program (2023)
Troinovski, Anton & Safronova, Valeriya, “Russia Takes Censorship to New Extremes, Stifling War Coverage,” New York Times (May 18, 2022)
Yablokov, Ilya & Gatov, Vasily, “Broadcasting through the (New) Iron Curtain: Practices, Challenges, and Legacies of Russia's Independent Media in Exile,” Journalism Studies (Feb. 11, 2025)
Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at [email protected]
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

Small Things Like These (2024), adapted by Edna Walsh from Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, tells the story of how coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) uncovers disturbing secrets in a small Irish town in the mid-1980s. While going about his job delivering coal, Furlong discovers the truth about the Magdalene laundries—the abusive asylums run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 1820s until 1996. During this period, thousands of girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labor and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment. Furlong’s discovery about the local convent in his town parallels the story of his remembering and having to come to terms with his own traumatic childhood. The film provides a powerful and moving depiction life in a small Irish town, the role of the Magdalene laundries, and the power of the Roman Catholic Church to enforce a code of silence about the abuses taking place within a community. 

Timestamps:
0:00   Introduction
2:14     The Magdalene laundries
6:39    Laundries in a broader social context
13:02   The convent’s power and secrecy
17:18    The absence of guilty men
18:31   The banality of evil
20:34  Why the laundries lasted so long
24:00  How they ended
26:02  Inquiries and accountability
28:16   Focus on the laundries in films and popular culture
30:38  The Bill Furlong character
36:20  Ireland in the 1980s

Further reading:
Seán Patrick Donlan, “Screening for Help – Irish Care and Confinement," Film Ireland (Nov. 21, 2025)
Keegan, Claire, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber 2021) 
McGourty, Courtney, “Not Merely a Shameful Past: The Case for State Responsibility in the Magdalene Laundries,” Opinio Juris  (Aug 11, 2023) 
Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries (2013)
Smith, James M., Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment  (Univ. Notre Dame Press 2007)

Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at [email protected]
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

We return to Syriana, a film we discussed previously in Episode 40, but one that feels newly urgent in light of the current war with Iran. When it was released in 2005, the film offered a dense, unsettling portrait of a post-9/11 world shaped by oil, covert operations, and overlapping networks of state and corporate power. Today, Syriana reads less as a product of its time and more as a reflection of a sharp turn in U.S. foreign policy, shaped by the erosion of institutional guardrails and a naked military imperialism—with the current reality even more dystopian than the one depicted in the film.
0:00     Introduction
1:15        Why Syriana is so relevant to the U.S. military action in Iran
3:20      "The Committee for the Liberation of Iran”
6:47       Syriana as Dubai
9:15       Corruption moves from sidelines to the cabinet under Trump
12:06     The continued vulnerability of migrant workers
14:03     The loss of U.S. omnipotence on drone warfare
16:29     The involvement of Israel
18:33     The authoritarian turn in U.S. foreign policy
21:20     Syriana: a must watch now
Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at [email protected]
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

This episode looks at The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s haunting exploration of surveillance, complicity, and the brittle architecture of authoritarian legality in the final years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany). The critically acclaimed 2006 film examines how law can be co-opted into an instrument of domination, how bureaucratic routines of “security” normalize repression, and how small acts of resistance acquire profound moral weight under systems built on fear and an extensive system of informers. The Lives of Others raises enduring questions about the ethics of observing and informing in Cold War Eastern Europe. To help unpack these themes, I’m joined by Mark Drumbl and Barbara Holá, whose recent book Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford Univ. Press) offers a deeply researched, empirically grounded look at informers within repressive regimes and transitional justice processes. 

Timestamps:

0:00      Introduction
4:23       East Germany in 1984
6:32.      The timelessness of informing
7:35.      The surveillance state in the Eastern bloc
13:27      Informers and informing
19:36.    Informing's afterlife
23:26    The book’s methodology and illustrative cases
33:26    The corrosive impact on social relations
35:02    Who becomes an informant and why
38:22    Informers and transitional justice
44:57    The opening of the secret files
50:39    Informers and agents
55:54    Resistance and historical revisionism
1:00:46 How the book came about

Further reading:
Ash, Timothy Garton, The File (1997)
Burkhard, Bilger, “Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi,” The New Yorker (May 27, 2024)
Cords, Suzzane, “Stasi: How the GDR kept its citizens under surveillance,” DW (Aug. 1, 2025)
Drumbl, Mark A. & Holá, Barbora, Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (2024)
Alford, C. Fred, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power (2001)
Lindenberger, Thomas, “Stasiploitation: Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s Historical Creativity in ‘The Lives of Others,’” 31 (3) German Studies Review 557 (2008)

Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. 
For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.html
You can contact him at [email protected]
You can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz 
You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm
You can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast