Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law concerning the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as demonstrative evidence, evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence, rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional testimony of live witnesses in court with communications via video and film technology. Another anxiety is the public perception of the trial itself as undisciplined and capricious rather than as controlled and truth-establishing. The Article concludes by showing that these anxieties are not well-founded because, when filmic proffers are properly considered, they are admitted as substantive and testimonial evidence. As a result, they are (or should be) subject to hearsay rules and cross-examination and to other rules intended to safeguard the integrity of the trial. The analysis in Judges as Film Critics is a continuation of the author\u27s prior research and publications in the field of law and culture, and draws from evidentiary doctrine and legal scholarship as well as from contemporary film theory and history. This combination takes afresh look atfilmic evidentiary proffers and questions the very assumptions that govern the meaning they are said to project, in light of contemporary theory devoted to the interpretation offilm. Such an analysis reconsiders the legal categories that regulate the use offilmic evidence-such as demonstrative, substantive, and real evidence-and begins the development of a more nuanced and common sense doctrine governing the treatment and meaning offilm in the courtroom. In light of the long history of the use offilm in court and the growing use of visual media in the courtroom, it is time to make sense of the case law purporting to explain the admissibility offilmic evidence in terms of a discipline devoted to thefilm medium

What’s missing from legal geography and materialist studies of law? Absence and the assembling of asylum appeal hearings in Europe

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: Due to the ethical and legally sensitive nature of the research, ethnographic notes taken in court could not be made openly available. Appellant interviewees were not asked for their permission to share their interview transcripts in an online open archive because of concerns that they could misunderstand what was being asked for, or feel obliged to agree but subsequently feel less able to conduct free conversation in research interviews as a result, thereby negatively impacting on the quality of the data generated. Additional details relating to, and data resulting from, to a survey taken during observations of British asylum appeals between 2013 and 2016 are available from the UK Data Archive (persistent identifier: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852032).There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non‐attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practiced. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)European Research Council (ERC

Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law concerning the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as demonstrative evidence, evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence, rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional testimony of live witnesses in court with communications via video and film technology. Another anxiety is the public perception of the trial itself as undisciplined and capricious rather than as controlled and truth-establishing. The Article concludes by showing that these anxieties are not well-founded because, when filmic proffers are properly considered, they are admitted as substantive and testimonial evidence. As a result, they are (or should be) subject to hearsay rules and cross-examination and to other rules intended to safeguard the integrity of the trial. The analysis in Judges as Film Critics is a continuation of the author\u27s prior research and publications in the field of law and culture, and draws from evidentiary doctrine and legal scholarship as well as from contemporary film theory and history. This combination takes afresh look atfilmic evidentiary proffers and questions the very assumptions that govern the meaning they are said to project, in light of contemporary theory devoted to the interpretation offilm. Such an analysis reconsiders the legal categories that regulate the use offilmic evidence-such as demonstrative, substantive, and real evidence-and begins the development of a more nuanced and common sense doctrine governing the treatment and meaning offilm in the courtroom. In light of the long history of the use offilm in court and the growing use of visual media in the courtroom, it is time to make sense of the case law purporting to explain the admissibility offilmic evidence in terms of a discipline devoted to thefilm medium