Courses

This course investigates the representation of law in film, video performance, and legal texts themselves. We start with the premise that law does its work as much through popular culture as through legal doctrines or institutions (the traditional objects of legal history). Aesthetic and popular representations of law lie at the very foundation of our formation as legal subjects. They influence legislators, judges, and juries (often more powerfully than doctrines or precedents do). At the same time, such representations can attempt a redistribution of the sensible that is fundamentally political, contesting legal ideology by offering an alternative domain of judgment and authority.

We will be watching films and other media representations of law in which performance is central, and placing these in conversation with judicial opinions, statutes, journalistic accounts, and theoretical and critical essays. We will look at law itself as a domain of performance (in, for instance, trials, punishment, policing, or torture). We will ask how our texts both reflect and inflect ideologies, exploring such general legal concepts as intention, motive, causation, the “reasonable,” or the “normal,” as well as more specific doctrinal issues (criminal and economic responsibility, freedom of expression, voyeurism, sexual offence, justice after atrocity, and more). At the center of our work together will be the development of techniques for the close “reading” (or interpretation) of film, performance, and legal texts. But the course will also bring literary theory, film theory, performance theory, and legal theory into conversation with one another, examining their various methodologies and those of sub-disciplines (such as “law and literature”) that have emerged from their conjunction.