Judicial Uses of Images

Vision in Decision

Author: Prof Peter Goodrich and Peter Goodrich Series: Law and Literature

This volume explores the use of images in legal decisions and its impact upon the transmission and authority of law. It addresses the impact of graphics, gifs, emojis, pictures, screenshots, photographs, film, and animé on judicial reasoning.

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Summary

Description

A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another insufflated rodent used in a union protest. The increasing use of images in case law and precedent in the common law world provides a novel visual atlas of how lawyers see. Using a corpus of many images drawn from decisions in different common law jurisdictions across theglobe, Judicial Uses of Images catalogues, analyzes, and reviews the normative significance and affective force of this new medium of legal expression and judgement. The remediation of law is criticallydissected in the terms of the emergent optical criteria and protocols of retinal justice..

Critic Reviews

The 'corpus' or 'body' of law is a visual image. This is in some tension with the common notion of jurisprudence as 'black letter' or flatly textual. This magnificent new book interrogates that seeming paradox: how does it challenge our notion of governance to acknowledge that law 'appears' as much as it is 'written'? Our fluidly associational apprehension of what Goodrich aptly dubs law's 'relay of optical forms' is worthy of study in an age when consciousness is ever more captured by the ungoverned chatter of photos, videos, and the hieroglyphs of emojis. Goodrich's brilliant--and brilliantly hilarious--account addresses how the assumed frames of law's landscape are both expanded and ruptured by the sensuousness of unruly scopic power. Patricia J. Williams, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University

About the Author

Peter Goodrich was founding Dean and Corporation of London Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Humanities at Cardozo School of Law New York, and Visiting Professor of Legal Studies, School of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi. Author of numerous books on legal theory, semiotics of law, law and literature, and the art of law, his most recent works include LegalEmblems and the Art of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Schreber's Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature (Elgar, 2021).