Film, Media, and Law

This course starts with three premises. Law plays a significant role in shaping the expressive media that represent our world to us. Those media in turn shape law and our experience of it, effectively forming us as legal subjects. But law and media may also act as conflicting domains of judgment, —spaces for the enactment of alternative visions of truth, authority, and justice. The course approaches questions of the relationship between these domains from the perspective of the humanities and social theory. This is not a class in which you will learn entertainment law, media regulation, or intellectual property as fields of legal practice. It is for those who wish to think historically, critically, and theoretically about film, media, and law.

As a workshop, the course has two aims: to explore new work on film, media, and law in conversation with scholars who are at the cutting edge of the field; and to collectively develop our own work in this vein. The guest scholars who will share their recent work with us represent the field’s diversity and richness. Their scholarship emerges from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, art and architecture, history, literature, music, philosophy, political theory, religion, theatre and performance, and (of course) film and media studies and law. What they share is a commitment to thinking about how law and media reflect, inflect, or challenge each other. The class will also serve as a workshop for developing student projects and professional skills with an eye to conference participation, thesis development, and possible publication. The last session will be dedicated to a mini-conference / workshop / celebratory finale in which students present their projects.

Enrollment is limited, but graduate students in any field and at any stage of study are welcome (as auditors or for credit), along with any other members of the scholarly community interested in attending.