Law, Popular Culture and the Arts in the 21st Century
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Law, Popular Culture and the Arts in the 21st Century Peter Robson1 · Sarah Marusek2 Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction Scholarly engagement with the interface between the formal justice system and popular culture has been relatively recent and has developed a tendency to focus on film. In the Bibliography of one of the early collections on Law and Film [1], the editors identified some 76 essays and books between 1986 and 2000. The first appeared in 1986 [2]. A broad expansive examination of popular culture was found in the 1992 meeting of American legal scholars [3]. This burgeoning movement examined film, television, light opera, women’s studies and literature. Its approach has generally not been continued [4]. Rather we have, on the one hand, works in distinctive fields focusing on single phenomena like film [5] or television [6, 7]. Some areas have received scant attention [8]. In addition, there have been collections centring on a broad theme such as visual studies [9], cultural legal studies [10] or legal language [11]. The vast majority of the scholarship has been from a cultural studies viewpoint with elements of social scientific analysis also encountered. Here we seek to reflect what we see as the worthwhile goal of crossing between these boundaries and bringing together work from the distinct traditions of literary criticism, social science and semiotics. Traditionally, semiotics has focused on visual representations of meaning [12]. Yet even the understanding of the visual has evolved from the static to the motile. Furthermore, the visual is no longer relegated to the framework of sighted, but instead the experience of seeing in media is synaesthetically expanded as a semiotic system [14] through the audible and the sensory [15]. The semiotics of law and popular culture embody a command of visual meaning that envisages the ordering of power through more than just the eyes, as the papers in this Special Issue show [13, 16, 17]. * Sarah Marusek [email protected] Peter Robson [email protected] 1
Glasgow, Scotland
2
Hilo, HI, USA
13
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P. Robson, S. Marusek
This collection brings together work being done by scholars from around the world on the links between the justice system and its representation in a variety of quite distinct fields. They enable us to appreciate the existence of very different ways of focusing on how justice is meted out and its effects. Taken together, they provide a richer description of the phenomenon of law and how it can affect people’s lives. The very real impact on individuals and groups which the operation of law has is emphasised through the various arts, whether they be in the visual media of paintings, films or television or through the written word of literature or song. We have organised these essays into these sub-categories but are keen to emphasise the links between these traditional art forms as well as newer phenomena like the internet. Hence there are essays on film, television, graphic art, litera
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