Description
Book SynopsisThe first book to focus exclusively on the significance of trial films for both film and legal studies. Chapters cover a variety of topics, such as how and why film audiences adopt the role of the jury, the narrative and visual conventions employed by directors, and the ways trial films offered insights into the events of the late 20th century.
Trade ReviewTrial Films on Trial successfully brings together distinguished and emerging scholars to engage important questions about law's representation in film and, fascinatingly, film's law-like logic."" - Daniel LaChance, author of
Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States""A marvelously generative text which will, I am certain, stand as an important and defining contribution to the field of law and film."" - Patricia Ewick, coauthor of
The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday LifeTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Pleasures and Possibilities of Trial Films by Austin Sarat, Jessica Silbey, Martha Merrill Umphrey
- Chapter 1. Law and the Order of Popular Culture by Carol J. Clover
- Chapter 2. Knowing It When We See It: Realism and Melodrama in American Film Since The Birth of a Nation by Ticien Marie Sassoubre
- Chapter 3. Reasonable Doubts, Unspoken Fears: Reassessing the Trial Film's ""Heroic Age"" by Barry Langford
- Chapter 4. Disorder in Court: Representations of Resistance to Law in Trial Film Dramas by Norman W. Spaulding
- Chapter 5. ""I Am Here. I Was There."": Haunted Testimony in The Memory of Justice and The Specialist by Katie Model
- Chapter 6. The Appearance of Truth: Juridical Reception and Photographic Evidence in Standard Operating Procedure by Jennifer Petersen
- Works Cited
- Contributors
- Index
