The Cinematics of Jurisprudence: Scenes of Law's Moving Image

Abstract

Finding the themes for an image-based jurisprudence within Law's Moving Image, a collection of interdisciplinary academic pieces on law and cinema, this review article attempts, using a Deleuzian art, to map the assemblages of law and cinema to a zone of shared conceptuality. Law's Moving Image addresses three elements of cinematics-framing, shot, and montage-and posits them as indistinguishable from the respective elements of a juristic image-censorship, sovereignty, and logic. We can understand why scholars are ceasing to ask just what the effect of law is on cinema, or vice versa, and beginning to focus on the indistinction that defines each as a conceptual practice.