DARLA: I don't trust them, but I know a thing or two about mind games. (To Angel) So do you. We played them together for over a century.
CORDELIA: Yes, but you were just soulless bloodsucking demons, they're lawyers.
ANGEL: She's right. We were amateurs.

The vampire as metaphor for evil, greed, corruption, otherness and other largely negative qualities has become ubiquitous to the point where Thomas C. Foster in his guide, How to Read Literature Like a Professor devotes a whole chapter to the literary meanings of vampires. As part of this development, one of the more interesting metaphoric uses of vampires has been the connection of vampires with lawyers as legal professionals are demonized both figuratively and literally in a variety of media. Legal scholars have explored numerous cultural, psychological and sociological causes for this demonization, but have largely focused on the “bad lawyer” image as opposed to exploring the metaphoric conflations and connections of lawyer/vampire. Certainly, one of the richest sources of popular culture portrayals of lawyers and vampires together takes place on Angel, which takes the premise of the evil lawyer to the extreme but also reverses and plays on many of the traditional lawyer/vampire tropes. We propose to examine this peculiarly rich and surprising relationship between lawyers and vampires in Angel.

Preliminary bibliography available upon request.

Our previous vampire scholarship: "Piercing the Corporate Veil - With a Stake? Vampire Imagery in the Law," in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, M. Barker and P. Day, eds., forthcoming. 

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