Envisioning Legality

Book excerpt: Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world’s leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these ‘readings’ of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with ‘harmless entertainment’. Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs; recognising and combatting structural injustices; and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.