Page 113 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

104 Per-Anders Forstorp

qualify as legitimately legal. In order to qualify as a legitimate legal event it
has to be identified as one on the basis of a preliminary investigation made by
a public prosecutor. This identification is done proximately close to the events
but prior to any court proceedings. Even if the very expression ―your words
against mine‖ does not have any formal legal standing (although with
counterparts in the theory of testimony and epistemology), the condition to
which it refers has a legal standing which is the very business of law. Based on
these assumptions, we may suggest that in a legal sense a ―your words against
mine‖ situation is somewhat of a communicative state of exception over which
the court cannot rule. The expression takes place in time prior to court
processes, yet it is already objected to some legitimate, albeit preliminary,
legal attention (cf. above). Popular legal culture thrives precisely on this
indeterminacy. The fact that it constitutes a state of exception explains why the
expression is missing in legal dictionaries and in the professional vocabulary
of law (cf. above about testimony). Talking of ―your words against mine‖
would be grossly redundant and unsophisticated in a context which is
permeated by contested accounts, by the authority of legal professionals and
by the access to relevant procedures for solving these disputes. These
contested versions are the very objects of the law. Using an expression like
―your words against mine‖ in a legal context would be to overly reduce the
complexity of what the law and the court is all about. The expression can be
used for various purposes before and after court proceedings, which we will
see in the analysis.

CASE STUDY: “WHAT ACTUALLY
HAPPENED AT THE BAR
IS STILL UNCLEAR”

The analysis of the Crazy Horse case contains several methodological
problems. There are problems, for instance, with the representation of the
details of the event as these are based on media accounts. This problem of
representation is central to the problem attended to in this analysis. Any
attempt at describing even the most schematic contours of this event (or, in
principle, any other event) runs into the difficulty of imposing an interpretation
on a series of circumstances by forcing dispersed fragments together. These
fragments are then converged into a narrative structure that functions in a daily
newspaper, in a court procedure, or in a scientific article. This methodological