ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that representational legality is a distinctive mode of inquiry within Cultural Legal Studies, particularly for scholars concerned with law and the visual. Representational legality refers to the ocular and spectacular nature of legality, and the connections between the image, imagination and ways of seeing that make up our experience as legal subjects. Scholars working in this tradition share a concern with the economies of looking, questions of genre that determine audience response, the affective perspective of the spectator, and their psychic investments. This chapter then sets out the connections between the three parts of this collection: ‘Spectacles of Law and Justice,’ ‘Juridical Spectators’ and ‘Scenes of Legality’.
