For our first series this semester, the students in the Collaborative decided to explore the relationships between law and culture. Our initial conversations around this topic explored how “the law” is not some neutral or everlasting thing, but changes based on shifts in cultural practice, political ideology, and various values and morals, among others. At the same time, the legal domain has tremendous authority to exercise control over everyday life through criminalizing various behaviors or through operationalizing discrimination through the courts.
The posts in this series are all motivated by recent, high-profile legal cases that took place over the summer of 2022. These include Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled there is no constitutional protection or right to an abortion; Depp v. Heard, which was focused on defamation related to Heard’s claims of “representing domestic abuse;” and the Department of Justice’s seizure of classified materials from former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which is an ongoing legal matter over the handling of classified materials and the power of the FBI to search the materials taken by former presidents at the end of their terms.
For each of these stories, we decided to evade questions of judgment around the legal matters themselves. We do not discuss, in this series, whether the verdict in Depp v Heard was incorrect and damaging, or what the political consequences of the Dobbs decision might be. We have chosen instead to examine issues of media framing around these issues, and how they indicate a constellation between law, media, technology, and culture. Across the four posts, you will note shifting conversations between broadcast/cable news and social media chatter. We illustrate repeatedly how the framing of these issues amplified elements of the stories that made it more difficult to assess what’s going on with the articulation between law and culture, sometimes in ways that made it next to impossible to follow the actual legal arguments, as with the social media conversations during Depp v Heard.
Collectively, then, this series offers a critique of media framing—both on broadcast, online, and social media—of recent high-profile legal cases. We suggest that media frames routinely reproduce ideological and often partisan framing, or they utilize trends in celebrity culture and fandom (as with Depp, Heard, and Trump) to reframe the issues away from the particular legal matter being debated. The effect of this, we suggest, prevents us from collectively having meaningful public discourse about legal processes. We hope these reflections inspire critical reading and attention to how legal matters are discussed in a variety of mediated spaces, so we might be better equipped to assess the ways law shapes culture, and vice versa.
