On Cameras, Videos, and Law: Seven Theses and a Meditation on Method

Abstract Today, to be “before the law” is to be before the camera: police cameras, security cameras, our ubiquitous phone cameras. It is to become a legal subject through the kaleidoscopic lawscape that appears on our screens. This essay is, first, an attempt to map out a larger project on what twenty-first-century cameras, videos, and streaming media mean for law: as vehicles of evidence, actors in evolving legal practices, subjects of juridical analysis, and objects and agents of the legal imaginary. The essay proposes a set of theses on legal cameras and videos, identified by seven rubrics: Heisenberg's camera, camera-as-third, the anti-narrative camera, audiovisual counter-publics, audiovisual counter-chronotopes, screen futurity, and the projective V-effect. At the same time, it serves as a meditation on methodology. Musing on the two critical modes that have dominated the literature on twenty-first-century audiovisual legal cultures—modes that the author calls the macro-theoretical and the micro-jurisprudential—the essay contrasts these with a more thickly descriptive mode of analysis, one that treats law as the product not primarily of vast social forces or minute doctrinal determinations but of on-the-ground encounters and moment-by-moment experience—experience (in the twenty-first century) engaged with and refracted through the camera.