edited by Austin Sarat
contributions by Anna McCarthy, David E. Patton, Desmond Manderson, Montré D. Carodine, Naomi Mezey, Alan L. Durham, Richard Sherwin, Michael S. Pardo, Laurie Ouellette and Grace Lee
University of Alabama Press, 2011
eISBN: 978-0-8173-8571-2 | Paper: 978-0-8173-5678-1
Library of Congress Classification PN1995.9.J8I53 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification 791.4365540973

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK


Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image—that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media.

Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to a potent and pervasive imaginative life of the law. The media’s projections of the legal system remind us not only of the way law lives in our imagination but also of the contingencies of our own legal and social arrangements.


Contributors to Imagining Legality are less interested in the accuracy of the portrayals of law in film and television than in exploring the conditions of law’s representation, circulation, and consumption in those media. In the same way that legal scholars have taken on the disciplinary perspectives of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology in relation to the law, these writers bring historical, sociological, and cultural analysis, as well as legal theory, to aid in the understanding of law and popular culture.