Law, Judges and Visual Culture

Leslie J Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429865763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Law, Judges and Visual Culture analyses how pictures have been used to make, manage and circulate ideas about the judiciary through a variety of media from the sixteenth century to the present.

This book offers a new approach to thinking about and making sense of the important social institution that is the judiciary. In an age in which visual images and celebrity play key roles in the way we produce, communicate and consume ideas about society and its key institutions, this book provides the first in-depth study of visual images of judges in these contexts. It not only examines what appears within the frame of these images; it also explores the impact technologies and the media industries that produce them have upon the way we engage with them, and the experiences and meanings they generate. Drawing upon a wide range of scholarship – including art history, film and television studies, and social and cultural studies, as well as law – and interviews with a variety of practitioners, painters, photographers, television script writers and producers, as well as court communication staff and judges, the book generates new and unique insights into making, managing and viewing pictures of judges.

Original and insightful, Law, Judges and Visual Culture will appeal to scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates from a variety of disciplines that hold an interest in the role of visual culture in the production of social justice and its institutions.

1 Judging pictures

Law, Judges and Visual Culture is about one of the institutional pillars of the rule of law in democracies: the judiciary. The decisions of those who hold judicial office have world changing and world creating qualities (Cover, 1986). How that institution is formed and reproduced, and how it engages with the community it serves are central concerns. More specifically, this book is a study of the role that pictures play in the formation and dissemination of the judiciary as an institution and as a cultural phenomenon in the Common Law tradition.

A central argument of the book is that pictures of judges have long played an important role in generating and circulating understandings of the judiciary as a legal institution. A related point is that the audiences for these pictures are diverse: fellow judges, the wider legal community and a variety of civil society audiences that make up the public more generally. Pictures of judges offer an opportunity to consider the impact of both continuity and change on the judiciary and its political, social and cultural role. The chapters that follow examine what appears within the frame of the picture, and consider the effects generated by various modes and technologies of picture production, distribution and consumption.

Today you can watch judges in great variety 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year on screen. Time and distance are relatively unimportant. Sitting in London in a classroom or office, or at home, in a café or on the street I can watch live broadcasts of judges of the UK Supreme Court carrying out their courtroom roles via the court’s website.¹ I can also access archived courtroom argument and judges delivering their decisions in earlier cases via the same source or via the court’s own YouTube channel.² The same digital technologies enable me to watch on demand judges of the High Court of Australia delivering judgments.³ Two clicks of the mouse and I can be scrolling through the extensive diet of programmes on TV Justiça, a dedicated channel of the judiciary in Brazil.⁴

These far from exhaust the options. Small and large screen judicial dramas and innumerable reality TV court shows provide popular commercial material via a range of on demand formats. In short, pictures of judges have never before been produced in such diversity and quantity in so many different jurisdictional settings. Digital technologies facilitate their potentially wide distribution and consumption by multiple and diverse audiences on a global scale.

The focus of this book is relatively modest. It explores domestically produced pictures of judges in one jurisdiction: England and Wales. Several factors have informed this decision. In part it is inspired by a concern that research on the judiciary in the UK is in urgent need of development (Genn, 2009). The book thus aims to contribute to judicial research. It is also designed to offer a fundamental challenge to judicial research by questioning what counts as a legitimate object of research. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1965/1990: 1) noted, in every discipline and area of research there exists a hierarchy of legitimate objects of study and legitimate approaches to the study of those objects.

Research and writing about the judiciary as an institution and the study of the lives of those who carry out the role of judge are shaped by this state of affairs. Legal scholars in the Common Law tradition have long been preoccupied with the word. Written texts (rules, books, reports, journals, etc.) and literary imagination (literary conventions, genres and literacy skills) have long been privileged by scholars and researchers as the objects and techniques that generate and reproduce ideas of the judiciary (Goodrich, 1986, 1990; Genn, 2009). The hierarchy of legitimate objects of judicial research has been challenged by social science informed empirical research. But, as Reiner (2007) notes, while this may change the legitimate objects of study, it remains the case that research continues to operate with limits, albeit with rather different hierarchies.

In short, when it comes to research on judges, pictures are most notable by their absence.⁵ At best they have been confined, literally and metaphorically, to the margins (Moran, 2012). At worst they have been off the radar of serious research.⁶ This project is a direct challenge to these traditions of ‘what counts’ as a serious object of judicial research.

The marginalisation of the visual in general and pictures more specifically in research examining law and its institutions is informed by the long-standing iconoclastic tendencies within Common Law (Douzinas and Nead, 1990). But, as Bruno Latour (2002) has noted, iconoclastic periods and projects need to be treated with caution. The often loudly stated hostility to visual images – calls for their destruction, demands that they be marginalised due to their dangerous and threatening nature – has also been intimately associated with intense interest in and activity devoted to image production, image management and image circulation. It is perhaps then no surprise that making pictures of the sovereign and her deputies, including the judiciary, first blossomed in the wake of the English Protestant Reformation that promoted the destruction of visual images (Piper, 1957).⁷

While the production and circulation of pictures of judicial office holders began to grow from the seventeenth century, one of the lingering related effects of iconoclasm is the taboos that prohibit any formal acknowledgement of their importance. These taboos have long supported the institutional, professional and scholarly disavowal of the importance of the visual. While this is not a situation unique to law, it is something that has particular importance in the context of the enduring scholarly preoccupation with the word.⁸

But the preoccupation with the word to the exclusion of all else in research on law in general and the judiciary in particular has been challenged. This book draws inspiration from and builds upon that work.⁹ One important driver informing the emergence of this scholarly interest is changes in the disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities. They are less clear cut than in the past. In the social sciences this has been called ‘the cultural turn’.¹⁰ Culture has become central to understanding institutions, social relations and society in general. It is a key site of social formation rather than a second order phenomenon merely reflecting other, more fundamental social, political and economic processes. Another driver is the changing significance of visual culture: the rise of a ‘post-literate’ society.¹¹ The impact of visual culture upon day-to-day legal practice, particularly in the courtroom, has been cited as a professionally focused factor influencing scholarly interest.¹² A connected pedagogic rationale aligns a growing interest in the visual image with a demand for visual education and visual literacy skills in legal education.¹³

There is an increasing body of work that explores the important role that visual culture plays in the formation and operation of the judiciary as an institution. It has many dimensions. It includes the study of the built environment where justice is staged and performed: the ‘temple of justice’. The spaces, places and buildings of justice and, more specifically, their architecture, spatial design, interior decoration and ornamentation are all visual components of judicial institutional visibility.¹⁴ Costume is another.¹⁵ The performance of judges and other players in the courtroom and the rituals that shape them are other key aspects of judicial visibility.¹⁶ The picture making considered in this book, as the various chapters that follow show, engages all of these aspects. But it puts them to work in a very specific context, and engages a variety of media. Making pictures of the judiciary has not been the subject of detailed or sustained analysis. This book seeks to change that state of affairs.

Another rationale for the book’s jurisdictional focus is to be found in scholarship on law and popular culture. Robson (2007) has noted the dominance of work that focuses on materials coming out of the USA, and has called for scholars who are examining the interface between law and culture to be sensitive to jurisdictional particularities. He urges researchers to pay attention to the impact of jurisdictional and cultural boundaries and contexts on (popular) cultural manifestations of law and justice. The jurisdictional focus of the present study responds to this call.

But the study of the nature and role of judicial pictures in the jurisdictional context of England and Wales needs to be treated with some caution. One reason for this is that this jurisdiction is not a space and place that exists in total isolation. As such, the case studies that follow necessarily have regard to aesthetic, cultural and technological innovations and de...