ABSTRACT
Law lives in images the way images live on the screen. Law's assimilation from the visual mass media of familiar cognitive and cultural templates, including character types and story forms that tell viewers how the world works and the way people may be expected to behave in a given set of circumstances. Law's emulation of the visual mass media's logic of desire which simultaneously stokes forbidden fantasies while providing moral cover in the form of a predatory Other on to whom the viewer may displace guilty pleasures for which the predator is condemned. The two-way traffic between law and popular culture may be managed in either direction for a broad range of strategic purposes. New visual technologies allow lawyers to picture evidence and argument with unprecedented persuasive power. Law performs its meanings in a shared, public world that is constituted through an overlapping network of discrete cultural and cognitive practices, social institutions, and inherited textual and audiovisual sources.
