Law On The Screen

by Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha Merrill

• ISBN13: 9780804751629
• ISBN10: 0804751625
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-29
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

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 forcese.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rightsin 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 contentthat is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative oneand expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

CONTRIBUTORS	xi
On Film and Law: Broadening the Focus	1	(26)
AUSTIN SARAT, LAWRENCE DOUGLAS, AND MARTHA MERRILL UMPHREY
Part I. Studies of Representation
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)	27	(55)
ORIT KAMIR
The Racial-Spatial Order and the Law: Devil in a Blue Dress	82	(24)
MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
Anti-Oedipus, Lynch: Initiatory Rites and the Ordeal of Justice	106	(47)
RICHARD K. SHERWIN
Part II. Studies of Reception
Reproducing a Trial: Evidence and Its Assessment in Paradise Lost	153	(48)
JENNIFER L. MNOOKIN
A Case for Corrective Criticism: A Civil Action	201	(30)
DIANE WALDMAN
"Everyone Went Wild over It": Film Audiences, Political Cinema, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington	231	(24)
ERIC SMOODIN
INDEX	255