Judicial Uses of Images

Peter Goodrich was founding Dean and Corporation of London Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Humanities at Cardozo School of Law New York, and Visiting Professor of Legal Studies, School of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi. Author of numerous books on legal theory, semiotics of law, law and literature, and the art of law, his most recent works include Legal Emblems and the Art of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Schreber's Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature (Elgar, 2021).

The 'corpus' or 'body' of law is a visual image. This is in some tension with the common notion of jurisprudence as 'black letter' or flatly textual. This magnificent new book interrogates that seeming paradox: how does it challenge our notion of governance to acknowledge that law 'appears' as much as it is 'written'? Our fluidly associational apprehension of what Goodrich aptly dubs law's 'relay of optical forms' is worthy of study in an age when consciousness is ever more captured by the ungoverned chatter of photos, videos, and the hieroglyphs of emojis. Goodrich's brilliant--and brilliantly hilarious--account addresses how the assumed frames of law's landscape are both expanded and ruptured by the sensuousness of unruly scopic power.

• Prelude 1: Introduction: A Morphology of Judicial Images 2: Maps, Diagrams, Schemata 3: Surplusage: Out of an Abundance of Words 4: Comedic and Erotic Depictions 5: Evidential Expositions 6: Extispicious Depictures 7: Retinal Justice Conclusion: Remediations