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Full-Text Articles in Law

A History Of Representations Of Justice: Coincident Preoccupations Of Law And Film, Jessica Silbey Jan 2007

A History Of Representations Of Justice: Coincident Preoccupations Of Law And Film, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

The American trial and the art of cinema share certain epistemological tendencies. Both stake claims to an authoritative form of knowledge based on the indubitable quality of observable phenomena. Both are preoccupied (sometimes to the point of self-defeat) with sustaining the authority that underlies the knowledge produced by visual perception. The American trial and art of cinema also increasingly share cultural space. Although the trial film (otherwise known as the courtroom drama) is as old as the medium of film the recent spate of popular trial films, be they fictional such as Runaway Jury or documentary such as Capturing the …


Truth Tales And Trial Films, Jessica Silbey Jan 2007

Truth Tales And Trial Films, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Investigations into law and popular culture preoccupy themselves with understanding how law and popular cultural forms work together to challenge or sustain community structures, identity and power. It is inevitable at this point in our cultural history that law and popular culture are intertwined. There are too many television shows, films, popular novels and web-based entertainment to withdraw "the law" (whatever that is) from the domain of popular culture. This article takes as a given the intermixing of law and popular culture, embracing it as a new feature of our popular legal consciousness. I suggest that one result of this …


Photography, Cinema And Time In Jane Campion's The Piano And Gail Jones' Sixty Lights, Sukhmani Khorana Jan 2007

Photography, Cinema And Time In Jane Campion's The Piano And Gail Jones' Sixty Lights, Sukhmani Khorana

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Using the logic of the absence-presence of light (through mimicking shadows and remnant ghosts) in the images/time-images of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights and Jane Campion’s The Piano, this paper attempts to frame time such that the over-exposed past becomes the blank page of the future. I propose that history, when viewed in the light of the present, enables a truly open future for female and postcolonial subjects. It is important, therefore, to think of the blank page emerging from the over-exposed image not as symbolic of a psychoanalytic lack of the phallus, but as an open response in the wake …