ABSTRACT
On reviewing the burgeoning literature of film and law, two general but important characteristics emerge. There is the tendency of scholars to reduce film to a resource for specific legal issues, points or questions (Greenfield, Osborn and Robson, 2001). As a consequence, the specificities of film, its particular properties as film disappear from view (Black, 1999). Secondly, despite the often interesting engagement between law and film, after its engagement, each medium retreats to its own corner relatively unscathed and looking pretty much as it had before the encounter. Later rather than sooner, it occurred to me that these two limiting factors of the study of film and law — erasure and the durability of the status quo — are the issues most recently and radically confronted by both critical legal and critical film theory.
