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Law and the Evidential Image

School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, p.haldar{at}bbk.ac.uk

Courts make use of a range of images as proof objects. This paper highlights the doctrinal assumptions that the image is a clear and perspicacious representation of a (probable) truth and that the ideal image would be the result of an acheiropoietic process. In contrast to judicially defined doctrine, evidential practices of looking at images tend to surrender to a clutter of detail and impurities. Images are rather examined and scrutinized with meticulous precision. The works of Ravit Reichman, Carlo Ginzburg, and Jacques Derrida have already done much to radicalize and re-house the concept of the detail. The argument here will be that an understanding of "detailism" as it reveals itself in the evidential practice of looking at images might help provide an alternative understanding of how the trial operates.

Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 4, No. 2, 139-155 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1743872108091471


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