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Illuminating their breadth and diversity, this book presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of legal documents and their manifold forms, uses, materialities and meanings.

Destroying records, documents and evidence is a commonly-used bureaucratic technique for mitigating the potential dangers of their dissemination. This occurs where evidentiary material contains, for instance, biohazardous substances such as blood, or contaminants such as asbestos, or other illicit ingredients, such as narcotics. Smuggled wildlife is frequently euthanised. Legal and administrative records will be retained for a prescribed period, after which they may be destroyed. Certain public records, in order to preserve secrecy or confidentiality, may be redacted, cancelled or deleted. This chapter discloses the range of ways that criminal evidence and records are destroyed or damaged as legitimate state practices. What remains of these destructive practices are ghostly apparitions, spectres of crime, and these generate new spectacles and new fears. This chapter understands these destructive state practices as acts that invoke ghosts. These ghosts are the traces of dead records, documents and evidence, things that were killed in the administration of justice.

Beginning in 1944, Frances Glessner Lee created a collection of at least twenty miniature doll's houses to assist police detectives in learning techniques of criminal investigation. These - the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death - are tiny and fully furnished buildings, primarily domestic interiors, which portray an unexplained or suspicious death. Most of them suggest intimate partner homicides, suicides or fatal domestic accidents. The Nutshells represent a strange convergence of archival practice and emotional engagement. They are regarded as providing autobiographical clues to Lee's misery and loneliness, and this article explores their ability to draw together affective and pedagogical responses to crime's archive. Starting with Carlo Ginzburg's 'clues' paradigm, the article draws on historical and critical scholarship on scale, size and affect to investigate the Nutshells' entanglement of archives and emotions.

This chapter explores what happens to old police photographs. When taken, these photographs capture the aftermath of a crime and are intended to have an evidentiary purpose. After the conclusion of proceedings, or the closure of the police file, these images sometimes acquire new value, separate from their role in a criminal investigation. Drawing upon the work of Luc Sante and Peter Doyle, this chapter seeks to understand what is forensic about forensic photographs and what else they might contain. It examines the effects of exhibiting police photographs in the cultural sphere, in their afterlife, exposing the aesthetic and affective attributes of evidentiary photography.

Lindy Chamberlain is the victim of Australia’s most notorious miscarriage of justice; in 1982 she was wrongly convicted of the murder of her baby daughter, Azaria. In the decades following her exoneration, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, as she is now known, came to an arrangement with the National Library of Australia to care for the papers she had accumulated as a result of her daughter’s death and the legal processes that followed. This article examines the ‘Chamberlain Papers’ through the lens of materiality and scholarship associated with the ‘archival turn’ in the humanities, social sciences and information sciences. This approach affords an understanding of documents as objects, artefacts and technologies. Working materially with documents provides new opportunities for legal scholars to understand files, papers, recordkeeping and bureaucracy, and gives legal significance to papers created outside the law.

© 2015 Routledge. All rights reserved. This is a conversation between a law professor (Katherine Biber), a curator and researcher of crime scene photographs (Peter Doyle), and a non-fiction writer of true crime (Kate Rossmanith). The three participants have begun what we hope will be a long-term collaboration, working with a shared interest in the cultural impact of crime.

Background and Purpose Induction of cellular migration is the primary effect of chemokine receptor activation. However, several chemokine receptor-like proteins bind chemokines without subsequent induction of intracellular signalling and chemotaxis. It has been suggested that they act as chemokine scavengers, which may control local chemokine levels and contribute to the function of chemokines during inflammation. This has been verified for the chemokine-like receptor proteins D6 and DARC as well as CCX-CKR. Here, we provide evidence for an additional biological function of human (h)CCX-CKR. Experimental Approach We used transfection strategies in HEK293 and human T cells. Key Results Co-expression of hCCX-CKR completely inhibits hCXCR3-induced chemotaxis. We found that hCCX-CKR forms complexes with hCXCR3, suggesting a relationship between CCX-CKR heteromerization and inhibition of chemotaxis. Moreover, negative binding cooperativity induced by ligands both for hCXCR3 and hCCX-CKR was observed in cells expressing both receptors. This negative cooperativity may also explain the hCCX-CKR-induced inhibition of chemotaxis. Conclusions and Implications These findings suggest that hCCX-CKR prevents hCXCR3-induced chemotaxis by heteromerization thus representing a novel mechanism of regulation of immune cell migration.

The Court Information Act 2010 (NSW) attempts to achieve transparency and accountability under the framework of an 'open justice' system. The Act aims to make court information more accessible to members of the public and media organisations, and to achieve this consistently across all of the NSW jurisdictions. In effect, the Act opens the jUdicial archive, making court records accessible to the public. By making this material accessible, the legislation has the potential to put evidence into a fresh context, after the facts have been resolved in litigation. This article considers several examples from Australia and abroad in which evidence from legal proceedings was put to unexpected uses - either by artists, curators or scholars - giving rise to ethical challenges to how we think about evidence after the conclusion of legal proceedings. Re-contextualising evidence carries with it the risk of harm, humiliation, and the exposure of sensitive and secret material. This article will argue that the Act cannot address the dangers of misuse of evidence without adopting an archival sensibility. It sets out some of the theories and practices adopted by archivists that could guide us before we open the evidentiary archive.

What happens to a country under constant surveillance? The recent decision in Atkins v The Queen provides a partial answer.1 The sheer availability of images seems to be driving decisions about their admissibility and use as identification evidence. Confronted with CCTV recordings associated with criminal activities English courts have been reluctant to restrict their admission or impose limitations on the scope or form of incriminating opinion derived from them. Although the Court of Appeal decision in Atkins v The Queen is concerned primarily with the way in which an opinion derived from CCTV images was expressed, the decision exposes jurisprudential weakness and continuing problems with photo comparison and facial-mapping evidence.