The 'corpus' or 'body' of law is a visual image. This is in some tension with the common notion of jurisprudence as 'black letter' or flatly textual. This magnificent new book interrogates that seeming paradox: how does it challenge our notion of governance to acknowledge that law 'appears' as much as it is 'written'? Our fluidly associational apprehension of what Goodrich aptly dubs law's 'relay of optical forms' is worthy of study in an age when consciousness is ever more captured by the ungoverned chatter of photos, videos, and the hieroglyphs of emojis. Goodrich's brilliant--and brilliantly hilarious--account addresses how the assumed frames of law's landscape are both expanded and ruptured by the sensuousness of unruly scopic power.

Patricia J. Williams, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University

Reading Peter Goodrich's Judicial Uses of Images was like being handed a mirror that reflects parts of the law we're trained not to see. As someone who works in the legal profession, I've always approached legal meaning as something constructed through text-statutes, precedents, procedural codes. But this book pulls you into a different orbit, arguing that vision, imagery, and affect have always played a vital role in how law exerts its power. The book is heavy on theory (continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, even theology), but it doesn't feel abstract. It encourages legal professionals to rethink what counts as legal reasoning and to recognise how much of our work depends on what is seen, staged, or implied-not just what is written.

Sheyla Rzaeva, Law Society Gazette