Agata Fijalkowski, "Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial" (Routledge, 2023)
Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials.\nThe dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials,\xa0Agata Fijalkowski's\xa0Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial\xa0(Routledge, 2023)\xa0examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity.\nAlex Batesmith\xa0is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion.\xa0Twitter: @batesmith.\xa0LinkedIn.\xa0\nHis recent publications include:\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Poetic Justice Products\u2019: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial\u201d\xa0in Christine Schw\xf6bel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds)\xa0Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice\xa0(Counterpress, forthcoming 2023, ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5)\n\n\n"Lawyers who want to make the world a better place \u2013 Scheingold and Sarat\u2019s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering"\xa0in D. Newman (ed.)\xa0Leading Works on the Legal Profession\xa0(Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3)\n\n\n\u201cInternational Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers"\xa0(2021)\xa0Journal of International Criminal Justice\xa019(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387)\n\n\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law