Law, Fiction, and the Visual: Expanding Research Forms, 12th November, 2024

Law is becoming warmer. The visual-material turn has led to a sensory revolution in the discipline; justice is felt, seen, and heard. This turn to subjectivity has opened up the space for innovations in form.

Fiction as Speculation

We began the day by discussing a draft of Cow and Court, my novella about a cow protection trial. Here’s a synopsis.

September 1920, Bombay High Court.
An English judge presides over a trial in which a priest is accused of inciting a deadly riot. The British Chewing Gum Company has been burnt to the ground. The public prosecutor—the case is far too easy for him—fishes for capital punishment.
The cow is presented in court.
The defendant narrates parables and nightmares. The judge and the public are hooked as scenes of horror unravel before them.
The judge wants to send the defendant to the asylum.
The prosecutor, worried the case is slipping from his hands, invites the police superintendent to prove the defendant is no simpleton but a first-rate criminal.
The defendant, in turn, accuses the Company-men of abusing the temple’s cow.
The police superintendent has employed a cow psychologist to show that the cow is well—she retains a notoriously healthy appetite.
Lalibai, a nautch girl, is invited as a witness.
“Lalibai, what do you do to these men that they vanish in thin air?” the judge asks.
“If you want to know the truth, the musicians are outside,” Lalibai responds.
“For the sake of the court, for the sake of law, for the sake of justice, for the sake of humanity, we must see what spell you cast. Invite the musicians,” orders the judge.
The musicians enter, Lalibai performs, the judge is mesmerized, and the court is transformed.

Cow and Court plays at the blurred boundaries of crime, madness, and religion and reveals the perennial fragility of law. Conditional on a guilty verdict, the judge has to predetermine if the defendant is a criminal, fanatic, or unsound. What does this pre-determination depend on? Culture? After all, a cow worshipper is pre-judged differently by a believing judge, a non-believing but religious judge, and an atheist judge.

What is the project’s relevance for research? Fiction allows speculation. The fictional trial is a counterfactual, a what-if, that contrasts with evidence-based research.

The presentation led to several questions. Some pertained to the narrative. How can a trial reveal power structures in court? What is the role of capital? How does the presence of an animal in court influence the narrative? Some questions led to a broader discussion on pedagogy. What is the role of fiction in the legal classroom?

Cow and Court was preceded by Cow and Company (2019), in which a British Chewing Gum Company has set up shop in Bombay to sell chewing gum. They are up against paan (betel leaves), which is in all mouths at all times. A cow is chosen as the mascot. She is up on all the posters. In the midst of protests for better living and working conditions in the mills, a rumour circulates—there's a cow in the chewing gum.  A riot follows, and the company is burnt to the ground. 

Law as fiction

The second presentation was Jonah Miller's book proposal, "The Police Outrage," which reconstructs a case of police brutality in 1850s London that led to the death of 21-year-old William Cogin.  

The primary material is fascinating. The same case was heard before three legal tribunals: an inquest, a public inquiry, and a trial.

Main witnesses appear in all trials. Their statements differ. Statements are shaped by cross-examination and hardly contain their own words. Often, lawyers set the agenda. Clerks, too, transcribe selectively. Institutions matter; the evidence from adversarial and inquisitory systems differ. The extent to which institutions, processes, and individuals influence these statements brings the legal outcome closer to fiction. More broadly, we are forced to ask if depositions or other legal documents can be taken as truth.

Questions followed. Some were structural. How should the evidence be integrated with the text, side by side, a pastiche? How will the narrative style change for a trade book? In non-fiction, what aspect of the narrative can be speculative? Ethical conundrums rose? Is the historian a prosecutor? Should she be?

The Visual in Law

The third part focused on the growing interest in the visual in law. We began with a discussion of Linda Mulcahy's 2017 article “Eyes of the Law: A Visual Turn in Socio‐Legal Studies?.” The discipline has expanded to include static and moving images as primary materials. But can we break the barrier of text and embrace the visual form in legal research?

Ogulcan Ekiz presented his visual project, A Photograph for the Next Century (2024), where he teases the longevity of a copyright. The work is a physical card with a golden figure that must be scratched to reveal the human photo beneath—a found photo. The rule is that it can only be scratched 70 years after the death of the author or the number of years for which copyright is provided, whichever is longer. The project is also pedagogically useful and should encourage us to gamify teaching. The project led to a number of questions. Can copyright be ever-greened? Is the card legal if the revealed figure is under copyright at the moment?