Abstract | Cinematic justice has attracted considerable academic attention over the past 25 years as scholars have sought to identify common themes, plots, and characteristics within the portrayal of law and lawyers. This has involved an engagement with aspects of theory that have sought to apply the concept of genre to legal film. One of the problems has been to delineate law from justice as films involving the broader concept may appear within recognized genres inter alia Westerns, Cop, and War films. Thus, justice may feature in various ways within numerous films regardless of the law or lawyers being involved. Human rights are inextricably linked to ideas of justice so may have a similar breadth of portrayal with an extremely diverse body of films. This is inevitable given the coverage of human rights. This chapter seeks to explore the interaction between law films and human rights, which provides two opportunities. Firstly, to capture films rooted in human rights and add them to the corpus of work. Secondly, and more importantly, this provides an opportunity to rework the analytical structure to consider law films. After a brief exploration of the journey that has developed the idea of a law film genre, the chapter sets out an initial framework for a rights-based approach. It then applies this approach to three diverse films that all have a distinct human rights dimension, Promising Young Woman, Inherit the Wind, and Shuddhi. It concludes that a human rights framework provides a novel method to reconsider the content of law film and creates new opportunities for analysis. |
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