Chuck Otey’s Pro Bono Barrister: Brooklyn Bar panel to explore the growing ‘Billyburg Effect’ on jury panels
Should Trial Lawyers Binge Watch Lena Dunham’s Edgy TV Show ‘Girls’ Before Picking a Jury Here?
“Put it this way,” a Court Street trial lawyer asked, “Would you want to have the cast of ‘Girls’ serve as the jury in a case you were trying here in Kings County?”
Answering his own question, citing “Girls” — the morally free-swinging Williamsburg television team ingeniously created by and starring Lena Dunham — he said, “It could be chaos. These [hipsters] are people who make their own rules and seem to be more concerned about what their fellow hipsters think than they are with the relevant law a judge might cite from PJI [Pattern Jury Instructions].”
Dunham’s “Girls” depicts the nitty gritty of hipster life, baring bodies and motives of a social set that, sociologists say, has its roots in the hippie era of the 1940s and ’50s, was then shared and was energized by the anti-Vietnam rage of the ’60s and ’70s, later flirted with yuppyism (young urban professionals) and then moved en masse to the rotting industrial sections and other run-down neighborhoods of major cities — in our case, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Gowanus, et. al. — to the present day.
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.