The Yale Visual Law Project is a student-initiated alternative law journal that aims to produce smart, engaging documentaries on cutting-edge legal issues. Launched at the Yale Law School in the 2010-11 academic year, the Project runs a yearlong practicum where law students collaborate with skilled professionals to research, write, direct, and produce short documentaries.
In their first year, the project hopes to produce short films focussing on the community harms of racial profiling through the contexts of immigration policy, criminal law enforcement and national security policy.
An earlier post on their blog illustrated how the law students will attempt to articulate legal arguments in their films:
"One goal of our films is to show that in many of these cases, what the court is seeing on an individual level is, when you pull the camera back, also occurring on a group level. We are trying to make race, groups, and group harms – which are now largely invisible – visible to the courts. We are trying to show that what courts may visualize as a practice only affecting individuals in specific instances is, in fact, affecting larger groups, and that these groups are both disproportionately exposed to the practice and are suffering disproportionate harms as a result of their exposure."
I look forward to seeing some of their outputs (as noted in the interesting and varied syllabus) as productions very soon!
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