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Book Review: A Transnational Study of Law and Justice on TV

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/0964663918786624
AuthorKieran Tranter
Date01 October 2018
Published date01 October 2018
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SLS786606 658..668 Book Reviews
665
Sharma N (2005) Anti-trafficking rhetoric and the making of a global apartheid. NWSA Journal
17(3), 88–111.
Veitch S (2007) Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering. London:
Routledge-Cavendish.
PETER ROBSON AND JENNIFER L. SCHULZ (eds), A Transnational Study of Law and Justice on TV.
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2016, pp. 320, ISBN 978-50990-568-3, £70.00 (hbk).
This is a fascinating book, but not quite in the ways that the editors planned. As planned,
it is an ambitious project that is aptly captured by the title, A Transnational Study of Law
and Justice on TV. The editors have gathered scholars in 14 different national jurisdic-
tions and commissioned an analysis of the schedules on free-to-air (except the United
States) television programing in those jurisdictions during November 2014. Each of
these studies forms a chapter of the volume. As such, it is less a usual edited volume
where editors string together diverse chapters related to a core theme and more a com-
posite research report comprising separate studies. However, each chapter stands alone.
There is little intertextual analysis or comparison of findings, even in the introductory
chapter, by the editors. Each chapter is a moment of frozen time, capturing the readily
forgotten national television schedules of broadcasters, and processing the found data
through a law in literature-derived coding on whether the shows are about ‘policing and
police processes’, ‘lawyers and courts’, or ‘punishment and prisons’.
What is fascinating about the project is not actually the findings. The findings can be
summarized briefly. First, in all jurisdictions, the preponderance of shows scheduled in
November 2014 was coded as involving policing and police processes. Second, the
preponderance of these shows was from the United States. In short, the contributions
in the book substantiate that (i) television in the West is an American medium and (ii)
there is an empirical basis for the ‘CSI effect’...

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