Eyes of the Law: A Visual Turn in Socio‐Legal Studies?
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12052 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| Author | Linda Mulcahy |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 44, ISSUE S1, OCTOBER 2017
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. S111±S128
Eyes of the Law: A Visual Turn in Socio-Legal Studies?
Linda Mulcahy*
A number of sub-disciplines have emerged in recent years with the
specific goal of examining the visual dynamics of academic fields of
inquiry. The turn to the visual masks a multitude of meanings about the
significance of the image, ranging from new ways of defining a field of
inquiry, to what constitutes legitimate sources for research or discus-
sions of image production or visual prompts as a data collection
method. This article asks what it means for socio-legal scholars to
engage with the image and the opportunity it might provide us with to
see what law looks like from the perspective of law's subjects. These
might include art installations in galleries, images of the places where
justice is administered as well as photographs created by those who
are subjected to legal regulation. In addition to a written essay I offer
up three visual essays which can be read and contemplated with or
without the written text which accompanies them.
INTRODUCTION
Socio-legal studies is still a relatively young intellectual movement but it has
already seen a number of transformations in how we conceptualize the
essence and boundaries of the field, and members of the socio-legal
community have always cast their net broadly in their exploration of the
intersections between law and other disciplines. The Journal of Law and
Society was explicitly set up as forum in which discussion about such
connections could be interrogated, and the extent to which apparently
distinctive disciplinary fields posed meaningful alternatives to each other
could be questioned. Since its first issue in 1974 the journal's editors have
S111
*Law Department, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London
WC2A 2AE, England
l.mulcahy@lse.ac.uk
The author would like to thank Wend Teeder for her help in undertaking background
research and for editorial assistance, and Jill Campbell for taking the photograph which
appears as Essay Four.
ß2017 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2017 Cardiff University Law School
published and commissioned a series of articles looking at the relationships
between law and psychology, anthropology, economics, film, science, and
literature as well as critical legal studies. It is noticeable that most emphasis
has been placed on discussion of the relationships between law and
sociology and there have been numerous accounts of seminal texts in the
sociology of law or the ways in which the study of the sociology of law has
evolved in other jurisdictions.
The contributors to this special issue were asked to reflect on the main
currents in the sociology of law in contemporary scholarship and the par-
ticular contribution of the journal in promoting debate and innovation. The
goal of this article is to investigate a nascent juncture between law and
another field of study which has not been extensively discussed in the journal
to date; the relationship between law, art, and the image. The `visual turn' in
late twentieth-century scholarship has been much discussed across disci-
plines in the social sciences and humanities and it has been claimed that
visual studies, like socio-legal studies before it, has the potential to uncover
connections between parts of the university that have historically been
disjointed.
1
The turn to the visual is of particular importance in con-
temporary legal systems. The proliferation of images and the saturation of
social and legal spaces in the latter part of the twentieth century has the
potential to create fundamental shifts in the way that people experience law
and legal phenomena and communicate about them within and across
societies. As Richard Sherwin has argued, these changes are causing the
shape and texture of the legal imagination to undergo radical change.
2
A number of sub-disciplines have now emerged with the specific goal of
examining the visual dynamics of academic fields of inquiry. We now talk of
visual criminology,
3
visual anthropology,
4
visual geography,
5
visual sociology,
6
S112
1 J. Elkins, Visual Studies ± A Skeptical Introduction (2003); W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture
Theory (1995).
2 R.K. Sherwin, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques and
Entanglements (2011).
3 See, for instance, E. Carrabine, `Image of Torture: Culture, Politics and Power'
(2011) 7 Crime, Media, Culture 5; K. Hayward and M. Presdee (eds.), Framing
Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image (2010); R. Lippens, `Control over
Emergence: Images of Radical Sovereignty in Pollock, Rothko and Rebeyrolle'
(2012) 35 Human Studies: International J. for Philosophy and Social Sciences 351;
K. Hayward, `Opening the Lens' in Hayward and Presdee, id.
4 J. Collier and M. Collier, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method
(1986); M. Mead, `Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words' in Principles of
Visual Anthropology, ed. P. Hockings (1995).
5 G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual
Materials (2016).
6 N. Fox, `Creativity, Anti-Humanism and the ``New Sociology of Art''' (2015) 51 J. of
Sociology 5; C. Graham, Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of the
English Law Court to 1914 (2003).
ß2017 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2017 Cardiff University Law School
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