FYS554

Visual storytelling has become central to how "justice" is both conceived and administered in the American legal system. From police body camera footage to the images on civilian bystanders' smartphones, to conflicting "truth" claims of video confessions, courtroom television, and victim impact videos, a form of documentary realism is today embedded in the law and its institutions. This class asks students to consider how legal processes--including the profound injustice and systemic racism of mass incarceration--might also be shaped by media fiction. Law and legal narratives – especially criminal legal narratives – are longstanding preoccupations of fictional film and television and ever proliferating in contemporary popular culture. How does the fictional life of the law shape the course of real justice? What forms of spectatorship are constructed by these media representations, which alternately position the viewer as a witness, detective, and juror?