In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence. By Katherine Biber. London: Routledge, 2018.

• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12411
• Published date: 01 June 2019

Sociolegal scholars will appreciate the application of critical

theory to this important case, especially the role of law in shaping

subjects and the role of subjects in shaping law. In particular,

Elander’s explanation of the hypocrisy behind the court’s creation

highlights what law and society scholars know well about how law

reflects and reinforces existing power structures. Likewise,

scholars of critical theory and international law, particularly those

hoping to broaden research on international criminal justice away

from more standard analyses of its efficacy or history, will appreci-

ate this study as part of a growing body of work on the politics

behind the creation and implementation of new legal institutions.

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In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence.By

Katherine Biber. London: Routledge, 2018.

Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee

“Evidence,” law professor Katherine Biber writes, “is law’s episte-

mology; it establishes what the law knows….” (3). When Biber is

writing about it, evidence also tells us something about how law

knows, as it is both “object and a process”, “noun and a verb”,

“testimony, documentary or material”, “circumstantial, provi-

sional, rebuttable…”, “voluminous and complex”, public, forensic,

digital, ephemeral. Police photographs, for instance, present, like

law, as neutral, but are “always tethered to a witness,” foundation-

ally “elusive and unstable” (15). A rule-bound system of material

presented for deliberation in which various strategies take shape,

“Evidence can be given or taken. It can be tendered, admitted,

and withdrawn…tampered with, concealed or destroyed (4).

Biber’s work attempts to upset this legal universe of truth-making

materials long enough for us to see not just how law is made but

how and why it is preserved after its key performance in court.

She does this through close attention to something rarely thought

about: a fascinating take on what happens to criminal evidence

after the trial.

Biber’s work has laid the foundations for emergent areas of

visual criminology and cultural studies in relationship to the law

(Biber 2007; Brown and Carrabine 2017; Rafter 2014). In this

current project, she acts in many ways as a trusted curator, guid-

ing us through a set of exhibitions in which she asks us to stop in

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