April 2022 – April 2023
Leslie Abramson returns to the American Bar Foundation for her second term as a Visiting Scholar, following an initial period of research from 2017 to 2018. Abramson is a film scholar who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She has taught law and cinema in the Law and Communications Schools at Loyola University Chicago.
Abramson is currently researching representations of the law in silent American cinema. Her work investigates how these original moving images of the legal system indoctrinated a largely unacquainted public, including a surging immigrant population, in American law and its workings. These visual narratives, she shows, judged the law, the legal system’s processes and practitioners, and the association among the citizenry, domestic law, and still consequential societal issues in ways that continue to inform legal representations today.
Abramson is the author, most recently, of Hitchcock and the Anxiety of Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and a contributor to Hitchcock and Adaptation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), American Cinema of the 1960s (Rutgers University Press, 2008), In the Limelight and Under the Microscope (Bloomsbury, 2011), and New Constellations (MIT Press, 2012), among others. She has also presented on law and cinema at the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.