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Courtrooms in pop culture are notably multicultural. In particular, there is a plenitude of African-American judges -- many more than are, still, at this late date, probably sitting on benches in actual American courtrooms -- and there is also no shortage of lawyers of colour. It's easy to forget, watching a courtroom scene that's been cast colour-blind, that in reality the system is still populated primarily by white guys whose inherited wealth and legacy got them into and through Yale law school, and who, every night, after defending or prosecuting non-white alleged criminals, head home to palatial estates in New Canaan, Connecticut. These guys only tend to show up in fictional courtrooms, however, when a point is being made about corrupt white privilege, and when they do, they're usually played by Jack Gilpin.

Gilpin -- in theatres this week as a period nondescript white guy in The Notorious Bettie Page -- is so thoroughly patrician in his appearance and mannerisms -- embodies so fully the archetypal clench-jawed, reserved, Ivy League, old-money WASP -- that it's easy to imagine his decision to become an actor at all really pissing off all his relatives; with a look like his, he should be a snooty white lawyer instead of just playing them on TV. But play them he does -- in a recurring role on Law & Order, in the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon, and even as a baby lawyer, one of Alan Dershowitz's students, in Reversal of Fortune. He's the perfect symbol of the patriarchy against which we instinctively want to rebel even when he isn't playing a lawyer (as in Barcelona, in which he's an American Consul in Spain whose Old Crow Chris Eigeman remorselessly steals). And we aren't any less disarmed by him when we know nothing more about his character than that he's in group therapy (as in Heartburn), where surely his only problem is something annoyingly WASPy; our guess is that he still hasn't forgiven his father for buying him a markedly inferior horse for polo.