Law and Visual Culture: Legal Subjectivity and the Awareness of Appearance

Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law. By Robert Post, with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey, and Reva B. Siegel. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. 169 pages. $18.95 (paper).

In the study of American contemporary culture, there are few subjects more topical than the link between jurisprudence and visual culture. In a disciplinary moment when critical race theory has taken center stage in our consideration of both critical legal studies and popular conceptions of law, the discourse of visual culture permeates and impacts legally enacted categories like race and gender and demands our critical attention. A cadre of scholars has already begun investigations into the intersections between law and visual culture: Peter Goodrich has for instance suggested that law is experienced through the power of visual culture, as "a system of images, not a system of rules." ¹ Richard Sherwin has cautioned us against what he calls a "jurisprudence of appearances"—a scenario where law is becoming dangerously delegitimized due to television and film representations. ² In our current national obsession with the relationship between appearance and character, we regularly confront issues of racial profiling, detainee appearances, hiring practices, and immigration rules that function to include or exclude certain "looks" from the legal, geographic, and national body. This timely and vital collection, Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law, questions both the relationships between individual appearance and identity and the role of the juridical in establishing conventions for understanding how those relations get raised. Particularly, this book looks at the realm of anti-discrimination law and thinks about how appearance has been historically and currently formulated as part of identity in classical liberal thinking. Drawing from legal scholars, moral philosophers, and postmodern rhetoricians, featuring essays by Robert Post, K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas Grey, and Reva Siegel, this collection offers the reader glimpses into the way anti-discrimination law draws upon the relationship between personhood and appearance as crucial to the projection of its main tenets. In so doing, the book contributes to the way the disciplines of legal studies and visual culture increasingly intersect in their formulation of subject formation. The collection is divided into six essays: Robert Post's initial title essay starts the book, four commentary essays on Post's work follow, and Post writes a final reply to the commentators. Each essay is concerned with Post's topic of anti-discrimination law, although each focuses upon rather different elements of Post's argument.

In a compelling beginning to his proposition of what he calls the sociological view of anti-discrimination law—a vision of law as a set of social practices that itself has the capacity to reconstruct other social practices for their transformation—Post recalls the 1992 Santa Cruz City Council ordinance that proposed prohibiting discrimination against persons on the basis of personal appearance. Moving from the controversy over "anti-lookism" to a broader discussion of the operations of law prohibiting discrimination based on appearance, Post positions his sociological view in contrast with what he calls the dominant conception of anti-discrimination law: a notion that "aspires to suppress categories of social judgment that are deemed likely to be infected with prejudice. . . . There is . . . a strong impulse within the dominant perspective to imagine the law as standing in a neutral space outside of history and of the contingent social practices of which history is comprised" (39). So, Post resists attempts to think of law as outside history and suggests that by thinking of law as a part of a series of social practices, the sociological vision will provide four compelling consequences: increased judicial accountability (42), greater doctrinal coherence (43), a questioning of what purpose judicial transformations serve (47), and a focus on racial and gendered classifications as themselves being markers of potential prejudice (49). Post's work houses a consistent tension between social practice—or...