The Judge on the Screen: A Translation and Critical Edition

Vincenzo Tomeo’s pioneering research in the 1960s and 1970s drew attention to the importance of popular culture in our understanding of the operation of the justice system. He was the first to recognize that how laws are interpreted and put into effect depends heavily on how the public understand them. This understanding comes from the ideas and understanding which the public have about the justice system. These ideas, in an era of mass popular culture, come largely from film. In his groundbreaking research he examined how judges and the police were viewed in popular film. He also stressed the importance of popular culture as opposed to classical accounts of law and justice and showed how these meshed with law and justice on film. The Judge on the Screen preceded the attention paid to popular culture by over a decade and provided empirical data some thirty years before any such work was carried out by Anglo-American and other European scholars. This classic work now appears for the first time in an English translation with additional supporting materials.

Peter Robson was solicitor, judge in Her Majesty’s courts and tribunal service (1992 - 2022) and professor of social welfare law at the University of Strathclyde (1992 - 2019).