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Imagining the Law of the Father: Loss, Dread, and Mourning in The Sweet Hereafter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Austin Sarat
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Abstract

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This essay takes the theme of the 1999 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, “The Legal Imagination: Taking on Cultural Studies,” as an occasion for trying to promote an engagement between sociological studies and cultural studies. It argues that mass mediated images are as powerful and pervasive as other social forces with which sociological studies is already engaged and that the time has come to move from the study of law on the books and in action to law in the image. This argument is developed by analyzing the significance of the ubiquitous presence of tropes of fatherhood in popular cultural iconography about law. Drawing on psychoanalysis, gender theory, and film studies, this essay presents a close reading of a single film, The Sweet Hereafter. This film exemplifies the ways in which fatherhood becomes one of the key terms through which law is mythologized and through which fantasies and anxieties about law are expressed. Exploring the imagination of law in and through mass medicated images, like those contained in The Sweet Hereafter, is an important and engaging new frontier for sociolegal studies.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 3 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This is an expanded version of the Presidential Address delivered on Saturday, May 29, 1999, at the Law and Society Association annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois. I am grateful to Stephanie Sandler, Amrita Basu, Roger Berkowitz, Cathy Ciepiela, Marianne Constable, Lawrence Douglas, Thomas Dumm, Patricia Ewick, William Felstiner, Peter Fitzpatrick, Nasser Hussain, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Sally Merry, Andy Parker, Carol Sanger, Stuart Scheingold, Kim Townsend, and Martha Umphrey for their generous reactions to the Presidential Address and/or for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for opportunities to present this paper to the Australian Law and Literature Conference, at Cornell Law School, and at the Clason Speaker Series at Western New England School of Law.

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