If you and your family get together every year and watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, it’s distinctly possible you have already noticed that the Griswold family is a danger to society. In the film, there are numerous laws broken, ranging from small and accidental to large and pre-planned. And who better to make sense of it all than a lawyer? That’s where Legal Eagle, a YouTuber whose channel is dedicated to examining popular culture and breaking down the difference between the kind of law you see practiced on TV and movies, and what he actually did in the real world when he used to be a trial attorney.
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A subset of his channel is a series called Laws Broken, where he looks at movies and TV shows, and “ruins” them by pointing out how illegal everything is. And, yes, ’tis the season for Legal Eagle to take aim at National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
You can check the video out below (although there’s an extended version on Nebula, a paid service, with details on how to get there at the end of this one).
This isn’t unique to the Christmas iteration, of course. You could watch National Lampoon’s Vacation and find everything from transporting a dead body across state lines (and later abandoning it without calling authorities) to kidnapping a security guard at gunpoint. God only knows what you would find in terms of looking at European Vacation and Vegas Vacation, considering the ample opportunities those settings provide for hijinks.
There’s also the fun of Legal Eagle’s own theory that “crime boss” Clark Griswold changed his name to Pierce Hawthorne and went on the run following the events of this movie.
If you’ve never checked his channel out before, here’s how Legal Eagle describes himself:
Do you want to know how our legal system works? You’ve come to the right place. LegalEagle is all about giving you an insider’s view to the legal system. Have some fun and learn to think like a lawyer.
I get asked a lot about whether being a practicing attorney is like being a lawyer on TV. I love watching legal movies and courtroom dramas. It’s one of the reasons I decided to become a lawyer. But sometimes they make me want to pull my hair out because they are ridiculous. So I created this channel to answer your burning questions about the law and the legal profession. While all legal movies and shows take dramatic license to make things more interesting (nobody wants to see hundreds of hours of brief writing), many of them have a grain of truth. Learn everything you always wanted to know about being an attorney!
