Imagining Law as Film (Representation without Reference?)

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511657535.010

9 - Imagining Law as Film (Representation without Reference?)

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010

Edited by

Matthew Anderson and

Austin Sarat: Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Matthew Anderson: Affiliation:
University of New England, Maine
Cathrine O. Frank: Affiliation:
University of New England, Maine

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Summary

Today we have law on the books, law in action, and now, law in the image…Law lives in images that today saturate our culture and that have a power all their own.

– Austin Sarat

What has film to do with law? Film can be about law, or ostensibly about law. It can reenact famous cases and controversies, or focus on various features of the legal system. Law films can turn viewers into mock jurors, investigators, and advocates. They can show us how the adversarial process reconstructs historic reality inside the courtroom, and how it enacts a dramatic reality of its own. Films can also use any of these topics as a pretext for launching a different sort of story altogether, a melodrama say, or a mystery, in which law serves as no more than a prop or plotting device. Just as law stories may set a story in motion that ultimately has little to do with law itself, the converse is also true. Films not apparently about law may provide insights into analytical methods, social values, and community aspirations that lie at the heart of the legal mind and culture. The quest for justice, and how it goes astray, the clash between vengeance and mercy or between the formality of rules and the free play of equity, the struggle to solve a mystery amid the infinite complexities of human motivation and the recursive contingencies of time and circumstance – each of these themes has a place in the legal process.

Type: Chapter
Information: Law and the Humanities
An Introduction
, pp. 241 - 268

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511657535.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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