Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture

by Austin Sarat (Editor), Desmond Manderson (Contributor), Montre D. Carodine (Contributor)

Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image—that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media.
Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to a potent and pervasive imaginative life of the law. The media’s projections of the legal system remind us not only of the way law lives in our imagination but also of the contingencies of our own legal and social arrangements.

Contributors to Imagining Legality are less interested in the accuracy of the portrayals of law in film and television than in exploring the conditions of law’s representation, circulation, and consumption in those media. In the same way that legal scholars have taken on the disciplinary perspectives of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology in relation to the law, these writers bring historical, sociological, and cultural analysis, as well as legal theory, to aid in the understanding of law and popular culture.

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College.

Reviews

[Ke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it is me, but I assumed that the book would cover a wider range of examples from popular culture. i.e. pop music, magazines, television, etc. However, the articles were mostly about film and television.