In
the past year, crime documentaries like Serial and Making a Murderer have been
spectacularly successful. These programs and others like them have pushed many
boundaries, including the boundaries between truth and justice, advocacy and
art, and law and fiction. In so doing the diverse programs have suggested a
role for critical interventions that interrogate where boundaries collapse and
offer analyses of the interrelation between domains. One particularly rich area
of inquiry in this context concerns witnessing, confession, and narrative. How
do these legal and personal stories get translated from law into media? And how
do humanistic devices help us better understand the complications of these
narratives as they exist within the legal system. This panel will address the
question of evidence, as it exists between the worlds of law and cultural
representation, and in particular the ways in which questions about evidence
are embedded in related questions about narrative design.
Business meeting at program conclusion for the Section on Law and the Humanities.
Business meeting during Section meal event for the Section on Evidence.