Cassandra E Sharp

Changing the channel: What to do with the critical abilities of law students as viewers?

It is now generally acknowledged within the cultural studies tradition that media can actually be consumed in a mediated sense — that is, oppositionally and not hegemonically. 1 The viewer is no longer seen as powerless and ‘vulnerable to the agencies of commerce and ideology’, but rather as both selective and active. 2 Law students, as viewers, are constantly interpreting, transforming and producing meaning in relation to the images of law presented to them. They are utilising this process to not only make sense of the law, but also to analyse and reflect on their personal ideas and values in light of their understandings. Of course, as students of the law, they are expected to have (or to develop during their studies) some capacity for evaluating legal issues from a critical perspective. But what other uses could be made of such critical abilities in relation to their legal identity construction and how they view the role of lawyering in general? This article suggests that legal education should recognise the usefulness of pop cultural representations as a catalyst to stimulate our law students’ critical abilities, and makes suggestions of how best to harness them.3

The moral choice of inFAMOUS: law and morality in video games

With increasing capacity for real-life simulation, high definition graphics, and complex interactive narrativity, video games now offer a high level of sophisticated engagement for players, which contribute significantly to their widespread popular support. As an extremely prevalent sub-culture of new media, they also provoke jurisprudential investigations. This article acknowledges the culturally constructed nature of ‘playing’ video games, and helps to explore the normative expectations of law that might be facilitated by the narrative structures inherent within the game itself. It does so by exploring one game series within this framework and asks what meaning can be transformed about issues of law, morality and power from playing these games. By analysing and critiquing the way in which both the narrative and the mechanics of this particular game shape our understanding of the relationship between power, law and morality, we argue that Infamous reflects a normative privileging of natural law.

#fear&loathing in Sydney: Law, Justice and the Experience of Fear in a Hashtag World

Abstract It is now commonplace for political discourse, news reports, and popular fictions to draw on themes of political violence and threats to national and individual security as mechanisms for the perpetuation of fear. Stories (whether fictive or factual) of terrorism, crisis, surveillance, racial stereotyping, and the fallibility of law have become a very real part of the mediated experience of fear for the public, and they provoke a number of questions surrounding complex issues of protectionism, identity, trust, and the conflation of law and justice. It has been argued that such stories are constructed and utilized by key decision-makers as effective politicking in order to promote protectionist policies and activities. In recognizing that this “politics of fear” rests upon public assumptions and beliefs concerning safety and risk, it is important to understand how a public experience of fear is actually expressed and constituted in the public imaginary. Using social media as an interesting lens through which we can understand how fear is defined and realized in everyday social interaction, the paper will demonstrate that in times of high alert Twitter provides access to an articulated experience of fear. This paper will qualitatively explore the co-production and (re)circulation of these assumptions and beliefs through one particular story: the “Sydney Siege” hostage event of December 2014. By focusing on the Twitter response to this event, the paper provides an empirical account of public critique of laws justice narrative through the emotional experience and expression of fear. Drawing on critical content analysis and the Aristotelian discourse analysis method, the paper illustrates the complicity of social media, emotion and a prevalent rhetoric of fear in the reinforcement of laws justice narrative during times of high alert or crisis.

The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV ‘revengendas’

The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeares Hamlet; Quentin Tarantinos Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates laws rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback.

Through the looking glass: the framing of law through popular imagination

It has been 150 years since the first publication of Lewis Carroll’s acclaimed children’s fiction Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and it remains a book that is appreciated widely across culture for its unique representation of the world. Indeed, the enduring quality of both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, is evident in the way they have inspired creations of art, theatrical performances, judicial decision-making, cinematic portrayals, videogame plot development, and of course, the desire for adventure. The 150th anniversary reminds us of not only the mesmeric impact of reading Alice’s adventures, but also the cultural ubiquity of