Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification.

Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242).

The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see:

https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work:

https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Speaker: Professor Paul Wragg, University of Leeds

Biography: Professor Paul Wragg is Professor of Media Law at the University of Leeds. He has written extensively on privacy and press freedom. His monograph on the compatibility of compulsory press regulation with press freedom was published by Hart in May, 2020. He is co-editor (with Professor András Koltay) of a collection of papers examining comparative privacy and defamation laws, published by Edward Elgar in July 2020 and was previously editor-in-chief of Communications Law (2016-2019). He has been at Leeds since September 2009, having previously taught at Durham University and the University of Birmingham.

For more information see:

https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Associate Professor John Sorabji (UCL)

The presentation will look at why England and Wales has, historically, been a 'good forum to shop in' for commercial dispute resolution. It will then consider four challenges to its ability to maintain that position, before turning to practical steps that could and, perhaps should, be taken to enable it to remain a forum of choice for commercial disputes.

3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.

For more information:

https://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

The government has recently announced that it intends to quash by legislation convictions of hundreds of subpostmasters who had been prosecuted by the Post Office for, variously, theft, fraud and false accounting. This follows a number of appeals which have already succeeded where it has been accepted that convictions that are based on generated by the Horizon software are necessarily unsafe. Usually, one would expect other subpostmasters to have to follow that same route, but the government is concerned about the delay in processing so many cases. Nonetheless it is unprecedented to quash convictions by legislative fiat in a situation when the courts would yet be competent to do the same; and notwithstanding the concerns of criminal and constitutional lawyers, a Bill to this effect appears likely to be produced this year and to receive support from all sides of the House of Commons.

In this short video Dr Jonathan Rogers explains the background, explores the challenges that will face those who draft the legislation, and comments further on the likely reservations that many will still entertain about this innovation.

Jonathan Rogers is Associate Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He co-founded the Criminal Law Reform Now Network (http://www.clrnn.co.uk/) in 2017 and leads an ongoing project by that network into the reform of private prosecutions, and in that capacity he gave evidence to the Justice Select Committee in 2020 on safeguards in the wake of the Post Office scandal.

For more information about Dr Rogers, you can also refer to his profile at:

https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/jw-rogers/78191

Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.

This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.