Art, value, law - the links between these three terms mark a history of struggle in the cultural scene. Studies of contemporary culture have thus increasingly turned to the image as central to the production of legitimacy, aesthetics and order. Judging the Image extends the cultural turn in legal and criminological studies by interrogating our responses to the image. This book provides a space to think through problems of ethics, social authority and the legal imagination. Concepts of memory and interpretation, violence and aesthetic, authority and legitimacy are considered in a diverse range of sites, including:

* body, performance and regulation
* judgment, censorship and controversial artworks
* graffiti and the aesthetics of public space
* HIV and the art of the disappearing body
* witnessing, ethics and the performance of suffering
* memorial images - art in the wake of disaster.

Alison Young is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.