Court of Images website
Court of images is a platform that grew out of a research project we conducted in 2023 on the relationship between law and its images, and their desired and actual effect on the public. The research project, Depicting Law, Streaming Justice, funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), allowed us to conduct fieldwork in the Supreme Courts of India and the UK. During the project, we found ourselves surrounded by never-ending research questions, curious leads, keen colleagues, and unusual connections that brought together different times and different places. As it progressed, the project highlighted the need for a network of multidisciplinary and multimethod approaches to explore the complex relationship between images, courts and society, going well beyond the current literature and available methods of inquiry.
We found that the methods available to the academy as an institution, where confined forms of knowledge production (episteme) are usually restricted to very narrowly defined forms of text production (techne) largely failed to discuss relations between visual productions of justice-making (sketches, photography, films, CCTV recordings, social media posts, web-streams, comics and other means of production and distribution of images), the society (classes, masses, bodies, genders, races…) and the courts (domestic and international courts, public, civil, political, show, televised, criminal trials, walls, stairs and ornaments of courts, digital courts surrounded by algorithms). The main reason, perhaps, for this omission, is the fact that images have something that exceeds the words, and what they can reveal may not always be translatable to the method and medium of the legal courts and the academy.
We want to prioritize the images on this platform, to let the images speak louder, to talk with the images. In this way, we want to be part of that civic relationship and build a community where contributors learn to look together at justice, at the courts and legal cases in different geographies and times through images. Towards this end, we invite contributors to think about images, law and the courts, as broadly or as narrowly as they wish.
