Justice & Law Quote by Rene Auberjonois

There is a soft, showbiz absurdity baked into the way Rene Auberjonois tells this: a father and son sharing a set, then being asked to pretend theyre father and son in conflict over an almost antique cause of action ("alienation of affection or something"). The casual vagueness of "or something" is doing real work. It signals how television churns through melodramatic legal premises so quickly that even the people inside them barely need to remember the details. What matters is the intimacy and the anecdote, not the plot.

The subtext is affectionate without getting gooey. Auberjonois frames the experience less as legacy-building and more as play: acting as a family craft you can practice together, even when the script demands a stylized version of familial rupture. That tension is the charm. The job asks them to perform estrangement; the memory is of closeness.

The context of L.A. Law matters, too. It was peak network prestige in the late 80s and early 90s, a machine for culturally legible issues packaged as weekly drama. Dropping a then-esoteric, old-fashioned tort into the mix fits the shows tone: legalistic language as a kind of prop, a way to make personal mess feel official.

Ending with "It was great" is both modest and revealing. No grand lesson, no actorly mystique. Just a snapshot of what television can be at its best: a workplace that briefly doubles as a family album, with the strange bonus of getting paid to stage your own relationship in quotation marks.