Law On The Screen (AMHERST SERIES IN LAW, JURISPRUDENCE, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804751625 ISBN 13: 9780804751629

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces—e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights—in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content—that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one—and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces—e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights—in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content—that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one—and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

Aus dem Klappentext

The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Law on the Screen

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5162-9

Contents

CONTRIBUTORS...........................................................................................................................................................................xiOn Film and Law: Broadening the Focus AUSTIN SARAT, LAWRENCE DOUGLAS, AND MARTHA MERRILL UMPHREY......................................................................................1Part I. Studies of RepresentationCinematic Judgment and Jurisprudence: A Woman's Memory, Recovery, and Justice in a Post-Traumatic Society (A Study of Polanski's Death and the Maiden) ORIT KAMIR.....................27The Racial-Spatial Order and the Law: Devil in a Blue Dress MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO........................................................................................................82Anti-Oedipus, Lynch: Initiatory Rites and the Ordeal of Justice RICHARD K. SHERWIN....................................................................................................106Part II. Studies of ReceptionReproducing a Trial: Evidence and Its Assessment in Paradise Lost JENNIFER L. MNOOKIN.................................................................................................153A Case for Corrective Criticism: A Civil Action DIANE WALDMAN.........................................................................................................................201"Everyone Went Wild over It": Film Audiences, Political Cinema, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ERIC SMOODIN.........................................................................231INDEX..................................................................................................................................................................................255

Chapter One

Cinematic Judgment and Jurisprudence: A Woman's Memory, Recovery, and Justice in a Post-Traumatic Society (A Study of Polanski's Death and the Maiden)

ORIT KAMIR

... how much to acknowledge, whether to punish and how to recover -Martha Minow

Introduction

Law and Film

This chapter's reading of a feature film demonstrates one type of work facilitated by the developing new field of "law and film," which this edited collection purports to introduce. "Law and film," an interdisciplinary, culturally oriented field in the making, can be viewed as a recent offshoot of the more established and familiar disciplines "law and society" and "law and literature." Law and film scholarship cannot yet be defined "scientifically" or characterized by a distinct methodology or worldview. It does, however, reflect shared fundamental assumptions concerning the central role of law and film in society. The links, analogies, and similarities between the discourses of law and film-and their sociocultural functions-invite some of the unique insights that can be gained from integrated analysis of these two spheres. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, writers exploring this new field emphasize different aspects and interpretations of this common ground.

My own law and film work reflects my understanding of law and film as founded upon three fundamental premises. The first premise is that law and film are two pivotal discourses that both reflect and refract fundamental values, images, notions of identity, lifestyles, and crises of their societies and cultures, and that there is a significant correlation between their parallel functions. Both law and film are dominant participants in the construction of concepts such as subject, community, identity, memory, gender roles, justice, and truth; they offer major sociocultural arenas where collective hopes, dreams, beliefs, anxieties, and frustrations are publicly portrayed, evaluated, and enacted. Law and film often perform these functions in ways that echo and reinforce each other, inviting attentive interdisciplinary examination. Certain underlying structures and modes of operation relevant to such functions are sometimes more explicit and identifiable in one discourse than in the other. The interdisciplinary comparison sheds light on the less obvious, analogous structures and modes of operation underlying the other discourse. Detailed comparison of such parallel structures may expand our understanding of both discourses, as well as the operation of social discourses and institutions at large. Most significant and intriguing of the parallel functions are the many subtle ways each field offers its readers or viewers a seductive invitation to take on a sociocultural persona and become part of an imagined (judging) community, sharing the worldview constituted by the law or the film. Much of my work, therefore, focuses on this.

The second premise is that some films, "law films" in particular, perform large-scale "legal indoctrination," this is, they train audiences in judgment while examining-and often reinforcing-legal norms, logic, and structures. For decades, James Boyd White has been exploring and demonstrating how legal rhetoric constitutes human subjects and communities of readers, endowing them with collective visions, aspirations, and hopes, and supplying them with frameworks, images, and stories to imagine themselves and their world. Judicial decision and other legal texts are inherently imbued with judgment and concerned with justice; their construction of subjects and communities are, therefore, inseparable from judgment and the search for justice. Less evidently-but no less significantly-the same can be said of many films. Films, much like judicial decisions and legislative rhetoric, can-and do-constitute communities (of viewers) that are often engaged in judgment, legal-like reasoning, the pursuit of justice, and self-creation through judgment and justice. Judgment is an activity not merely portrayed but often actively performed by films, together with their (constructed and/or actual) viewers; it is often a function of film's constitution of a community of viewers and cinematic engagement in the social constitution of primary values, institutions, and concepts.

The many and various means of performing such cinematic judgment and engaging viewers in cinematic judging acts can be complex, subtle, and often elusive, and thus uncritically influential on viewers. They frequently involve cinematic choices regarding genre, editing, methods of narration, plots, points of view, rhythm, and casting. Manipulation of viewer identification with on-screen characters and eliciting emotional responses to powerful imagery are particularly frequent strategies. Law films, which offer a direct combination and fictional integration of these two fields, are of particular interest in this context.

Law films, which treat the law as their subject matter, create on-screen fictional legal systems that execute judgment, pursue justice, and construct social subjects and communities both on- and off-screen. At the same time such law films may pass cinematic judgment on these "legally constructed" individuals and communities and on the judgment and justice their fictional legal systems demonstrate and execute. A film can be read as passing such cinematic judgment when, in addition to portraying an on-screen fictional legal system, it offers alternative cinematic constructions of subjects and societies, of justice and judgment. In its cinematic judgment, a law film may echo the worldview encoded in its fictional legal system, allowing legal and cinematic mechanisms to reinforce...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804751625
• ISBN 13: 9780804751629
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Herausgeber: Sarat Austin, Douglas Lawrence, Umphrey Martha Merrill
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland