Judicial Uses of Images: Vision in Decision

by Peter Goodrich

Overview

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 the globe, 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 critically dissected in the terms of the emergent optical criteria and protocols of retinal justice.


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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192848772
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2023
Series:	Law and Literature
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.50(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law

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 Legal Emblems 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).

Table of Contents

Prelude1. Introduction: A Morphology of Judicial Images2. Maps, Diagrams, Schemata3. Surplusage: Out of an Abundance of Words4. Comedic and Erotic Depictions5. Evidential Expositions6. Extispicious Depictures7. Retinal JusticeConclusion: Remediations

Editorial 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

"Reading Peter Goodrich's Judicial Uses of Images was like being handed a mirror that reflects parts of the law we're trained not to see. As someone who works in the legal profession, I've always approached legal meaning as something constructed through text-statutes, precedents, procedural codes. But this book pulls you into a different orbit, arguing that vision, imagery, and affect have always played a vital role in how law exerts its power. The book is heavy on theory (continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, even theology), but it doesn't feel abstract. It encourages legal professionals to rethink what counts as legal reasoning and to recognise how much of our work depends on what is seen, staged, or implied-not just what is written." — Sheyla Rzaeva, Law Society Gazette

From the Publisher