Page 112 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Your Words Against Mine‖: States of Exception… 103

juridical process where various cultural representations of legal affairs and the
law become public and visible [Macaulay]. As an informal juridical process,
the media may or may not affect legal culture proper, an issue which is at the
core of the law and society movement and which will be touched upon below.
Media is without dispute one of the most important institutions for the public
negotiation of attitudes, norms and values attached to the law. This is where
ethical, political and social consensus as well as controversy and dissent are
enacted.
By ―legal culture‖, Friedman [Friedman, p. 1579] refers to the ―ideas,
attitudes, values, and opinions about law held by people in a society‖. In
distinguishing ―popular legal culture‖ from ―legal culture‖, he identifies two
senses. The first sense concerns ―‖ideas and attitudes about law which
ordinary people or more generally lay people hold‖ (ibid, p. 1580) and in the
second sense one can think of ―books, songs, movies, plays and TV shows
which are about law and lawyers, and which are aimed at a general audience‖
[Greenfield, Osborn & Robson]. In this definition he does not explicitly
mention the media, although from the rest of his article it is clear that this is
included in the second sense [Carrillo 2007]. Popular legal culture in this sense
refers to many forms of cultural expression and to the ―consumers of the legal
system‖ as Friedman likes to call the users. In science studies it is common to
talk of ―public understanding of science‖ [Irwin & Wynne] [Irwin & Michael
2003] and we could make an analogy to law as the ―public understanding of
law‖.
Media as a setting for popular legal culture shows plenty of ambiguity.
The expression ―your words against mine‖ is part of everyday discourse as
well as part of the symbolic production in the media. The examples mentioned
initially are taken from the media, an institution for the representation of
norms and values that peculiarly both are and are not part of legal culture. The
media is legal in the sense that some actors with a legal standing, such as the
police and public prosecutors, actually are involved at an early stage of the
process of media representation. These actors are confronted and interviewed
in the media and thus explicitly become part of the informal juridical process
through how the media represents them. The expression is part of popular
legal culture since making verdicts of any kind is not the duty of the media in a
state governed by law. A situation involving the expression ―your words
against mine‖, or a situation described as such using other similar expressions,
is paradoxically both a legal and a popular legal event: it cannot (yet) be
decided upon legally because it takes place before any legal action has been
initiated. But in order to be part of legal action, however, the situations have to