CLV215 | Law, Visuality and Justice

Law has been considered a field of letters and texts that stamp its authority over jurisdictions. However, what does it mean to trouble this notion of the legal with the word? This paper begins by looking at the vexed association of the law with images and asking what does it mean to for the justice to be seen to be done? Robert Cover has famously quoted, “Legal interpretation takes place in a field of life and death” (1986) explaining how law is a site of violence brought through its words and interpretive acts it signals. Taking cue from the same, I feel any scholar pursuing the field of legal studies and public policy needs to be abreast about the power differentials that in/form our everyday. As such contextualizing law as a question of violence, I repose my former question to see what constitutes justice.

This course as such attempts to see how the visual turn of law lends meaning making into modern law with a focus on the Indian colonial and postcolonial context. The methods used in the seminar style discussion shall include reading case law around (photographic and digital) images and analysing images of law in order to ‘see’ how visuality lends meaning- making within the modern Indian discourse.