Evidence and the Archive

Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, historian and criminologist and Professor of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. She researches in the field of evidence, criminal procedure, visual culture and documentation. She is author of Captive Images: Race, Crime, Photography (2007) and the forthcoming In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence (2017). She is co-editor of The Lindy Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law, Memory (2009), and an editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture (forthcoming). Trish Luker is based in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. Her research focus is in interdisciplinary studies of law and the humanities, particularly in relation to documentary practices and evidence law. She is a co-editor of Australian Feminist Judgments: Righting and Rewriting Law (2014). She is currently working on a project entitled ‘The Court as Archive: Rethinking the Institutional Role of Federal Courts of Record’. During 2016, together with Katherine Biber, she will begin a project entitled ‘What is a Document? Evidentiary Challenges in the Digital Age’.

Introduction: Evidence and the Archive: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Emotion 1. Affecting Evidence: Edith Thompson’s Epistolary Archive 2. Unsettled Explorations of Law’s Archives: The Allure and Anxiety of Solomon Islands’ Court Records 3. But I Want to Speak Out: Making Art from Women’s Testimonies 4. Rotten Prettiness? The Forensic Aesthetic and Crime as Art 5. Plots and Artefacts: Courts and Criminal Evidence in the Production of True Crime Writing 6. On Viewing Crime Photographs: The Sleep of Reason 7. Archiving the Northern Territory Intervention in Law and in the Literary Counter-Imaginary 8. Stained Evidence: Blood, Semen And Matter on the Clothes of Kennedy, Lewinsky, and Margiela 9. Telling a History of Australian Women Judges through Courts’ Ceremonial Archives