THE JUSTICE OF JURISDICTION: THE POLICING AND BREACHING OF BOUNDARIES IN ORSON WELLES' TOUCH OF EVIL

If assertions of jurisdiction sometimes seem to precede and make possible law's claims of justice, one can find popular culture works that, thinking "jurisprudentially", trouble that temporal logic as well as the naturalizing of boundaries that are basic to the legitimacy of law. Repl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:English language notes 2010-10, Vol.48 (2), p.111
Main Authors: Sarat, Austin, Umphrey, Martha Merrill
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Jurisdiction
Justice
Law
Motion picture criticism
Welles, Orson (1915-1985)
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:If assertions of jurisdiction sometimes seem to precede and make possible law's claims of justice, one can find popular culture works that, thinking "jurisprudentially", trouble that temporal logic as well as the naturalizing of boundaries that are basic to the legitimacy of law. Replete with images that call into question the justice of law's jurisdictional claims and line-drawing obsessions, these popular works can remind one of the contingencies of law's boundary-defining exercises. In this sense, they provide a kind of dissenting opinion, opening up the relationship of justice and jurisdiction to scrutiny. They are resources for resisting law's claims to the governance of particular territories or to its differential protections of members and strangers. Here, Sarat and Umphrey offer a reading of Orson Welles's 1961 noir masterpiece Touch of Evil in order to explore the ways it dissents and destabilizes commonplace imaginings of the nexus between justice and jurisdiction.
ISSN:0013-8282
2573-3575
DOI:10.1215/00138282-48.2.111