The theatre shares many features with the law. One key commonality is the presence of dressers in both professions. In the law and the theatre, the dresser is a key intermediary in the transformation of bodies and the transmission of professional culture, while being relatively under-recognised in criticism and scholarship. The point of departure for this paper is that the dresser is a figure worthy of further scrutiny. As the Court and Ceremonial Manager at Ede and Ravenscroft, Christopher Allen is perhaps one of the common law's most important dressers. Allan is instrumental to the entry of the judiciary into their new roles by dressing them for the very first time in advance of their swearing-in ceremony. Established as a wig-making business in 1726 (later selling robes from 1871), Ede and Ravenscroft are the tailors and robe-makers of choice for the judiciary, not only in England and Wales, but in many common-law jurisdictions. This paper draws upon an interview with Allen about his work as the dresser of the judicial establishment of England and Wales in order to explore the role of dressing up in the production of images of the judiciary. Thinking about the role of the dresser in the production of the judicial image draws attention not simply to the function that dress plays in the law, but foregrounds the process of dressing up as a key aspect of the law's performance.

In 2014, something happened that changed how the media report on court proceedings in South Africa. The Oscar Pistorius trial proceedings attracted much media attention. International journalists flocked into South Africa in droves. Our newspapers, our televisions, our radios, even our Facebook feeds were flooded with information. An entire twenty-four-hour television channel was created with the sole purpose of televising, and then discussing, the proceedings. Everything about the trial – the judge's rulings, the witnesses who gave evidence and especially the verdict – clogged social-media newsfeeds on laptops and other devices for months on end. This has changed irreversibly the manner in which the media and the justice system in South Africa converge. Through a focus on the debates in and out of the courtroom that the Pistorius trial generated, this paper explores the intersection between the judicial function, the media and the public. It was an important moment in post-apartheid South Africa, ushering in a new way of making and distributing judicial images to the public and thereby bringing into being new ways for the media and the public to access and assess the adjudicative role of judges.

Judges perform an important role on behalf of society, as impartial decision-makers, interpreting and applying the law, presiding over courtrooms and ensuring a fair trial. The image of the judge – how they are viewed culturally – reinforces their role, emphasising their authority and neutrality, thus supporting the legitimacy of the court as an institution. Increasingly, judges use video conferencing where either they, or other participants, are located away from the courtroom. Reporting on a three-year empirical study, this paper argues that the introduction of video-conferencing technologies in court has had a profound impact on the production, management and consumption of judicial images, with implications for the role of the judge. Video links challenge cultural assumptions about how the role of the judge is performed and what the image of the judge should be. We argue that greater congruence needs to be achieved over video links between that image and the role of the judge.

The paper examines the changing nature of publicity in the courts, tracing three distinct but interconnected phases of publicity using Jeremy Bentham's theory of open justice and publicity as a framework. The first phase is press coverage, with the news media chronicling the justice system for the general population, most recently including televised court proceedings. The second is the appointment of Courts Information Officers, occurring as early as the 1930s and growing in impact since the 1990s, established to facilitate the relationship between courts and the news media. The third and final phase is the Internet, including social media, resulting in changes to news media models and driving contemporary practices of court-generated media. The paper concludes that, while media and communication practices have changed radically since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the concept of publicity has shifted, Bentham's approach to open justice remains salient for twenty-first-century courts’ communication.

Studies exploring the link between the representation of judges, photography and mass media tend to focus on the appearance of cameras in courtrooms and the reproduction of the resulting photographs in the press at the beginning of the twentieth century. But more than fifty years separate these developments from the birth of photography in the late 1830s. This study examines a previously unexplored encounter between the English judiciary and photography that began in the 1860s. The pictures where known as ‘carte de visite’. They were the first type of photographic image capable of being mass produced. It is a form of photography that, for a period of almost twenty years, attracted a frenzy of interest. Drawing upon a number of archives, including the library of Lincoln's Inn, London's National Portrait Gallery and my own personal collection this paper has two objectives. The first is to examine the carte portraits of senior members of the judiciary that were produced during that time. What appears within the frame of this new form of judicial portraiture? Of particular interest is the impact the chemical and technological developments that come together in carte photographs had on what appears within the frame of portraits. The second objective is to examine the manner in which they were displayed. This engages a commonplace of scholarship on portraiture; the location and mode of display shape the meaning of what lies within the frame of the picture. Carte portraits were produced with a particular display in mind: the album. They were to be viewed not in isolation, but as part of an assemblage of portraits. Few albums survive. Those that do offer a rare opportunity to examine the way carte portraits of judges were used and the meanings they generated through their display. Three albums containing carte portraits of judges will be considered.

This paper offers a revisionist history of the banning of photography in English and Welsh courts in 1925 and explores the contention that a complete rationale for the ban has never been adequately articulated. While existing accounts of the ban have placed emphasis on the outrage caused by press coverage of a handful of sensational murder trials, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of photographs of trial scenes in the decades leading up to the ban. In doing so, it argues that the exposure of the legal system to scrutiny by the press and public, made possible by new technologies and reporting practices, was much more pervasive than has previously been suggested. It also contends that, although parliamentarians claimed that the purpose of the ban was to protect vulnerable members of the public, it actually did a much better job of preserving the interests of the legal, political and social elite, including judges, against a backdrop of fears about an increasingly disrespectful populace. More particularly, it is suggested that the ban allowed the state to take back its monopoly over the production, management and consumption of images of judges and other key actors in the courtroom in an effort to re-impose social order and retain the mystery of law.

This paper attempts to counter legal studies’ common reading of court TV shows by starting with an understanding of them as television, rather comparing them to ‘real courts’. It analyses two recent examples of British court TV shows – Judge Rinder (ITV, 2014–) and Judge Geordie (MTV, 2015) – to draw out how the text's form establishes particular kinds of ‘televisual legal consciousness’. Judge Rinder’s daytime address and his camped authority allow a frame in which humour can disarm conflict and reveal wider political injustice. Judge Geordie’s irreverent upturning of the judged into judge draws upon the registers of youth reality television to privilege affect and emotion. In staging some of the tensions between law's masculine rationality and popular culture's feminine emotionality, these shows enact their interdependence. Such an analysis that includes attention to form, address and genre allows us a deeper exploration of the relationship between television, law and the everyday.