FILM AND LAW

Prerequisites: the instructor’s permission. From its beginnings, film has been preoccupied with law: in cops and robbers silent films, courtroom drama, police procedural, judge reality show, or all the scenes that fill our media-saturated world. What do films and other audio-visual media tell us about what it’s like to come before the law, or about such substantive issues as what counts as murder, war crimes, torture, sexual abuse? How do films model the techniques that lawyers use to sway the passions of their audiences? How do they model the symbolism of their gestures, icons, images? If films and other audio-visual media rewrite legal events, what is their effect: on law? on legal audiences? How is the experience of being a film spectator both like and unlike the experience of being a legal subject? This course investigates such questions by looking at representations of law in film and other audio-visual media. We will seek to understand, first, how film represents law, and, second,how film attempts to shape law (influencing legal norms, intervening in legal regimes). The seminar’s principal texts will be the films themselves, but we will also read relevant legal cases and film theory in order to deepen our understanding of both legal and film regimes.