Trials

by Umphrey, Martha Merrill

• ISBN13: 9780754625124
• ISBN10: 0754625125
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-15
• Publisher: Ashgate Pub Co

Summary

Written by leading experts in the fields of law and cultural studies, these essays address the cultural dimension of trials. Taken together, these essays conceive of trials as sites of legal performance and as critical public spaces in which the law both encounters and interacts dialogically with the culture in which it is embedded.

Table of Contents

Introduction: legal performances and public cultures

Trials as Sites of Performance and Narrative

'The play's the thing': an unscientific reflection on courts under the rubric of theater

The lawfulness of the American trial

An analysis of closing arguments to a jury

Law frames: historical truth and narrative necessity in a criminal case

Speaking of death: narratives of violence in capital trials

Evidence and the Production of Truth

Just the facts, Ma'am: sexualized violence, evidentiary habits and the revision of truth

Theaters of proof; visual evidence and the law in Call Northside 777

Film as witness: screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal

A reporter at large: doubt

Dialogics of Law and Culture

Story and transcription in the trial of John Brown

Rats, pigs, and statues on trial: the creation of cultural narratives in the prosecution of animals and inanimate objects

Constructing a common language: the function of Nuremberg in the problematization of postapartheid justice

'The Trial': a parody of law amid the mockery of men in post-colonial Papua New Guinea

Forms of judicial blindness, or the evidence of what cannot be seen: traumatic narratives and legal repetitions in the O.J. Simpson case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata

Index

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