Vincenzo Tomeo’s pioneering research drew attention to the importance of popular culture in our understanding of the operation of the justice system. 

He was the first to recognise 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 significantly from film. 

In his ground-breaking research he examines how judges and the police have been viewed in popular film. He also stresses the importance of popular culture as opposed to classical accounts of law and justice and shows how these meshed with law and justice on film.

This is the first time many will have the chance to read the pioneering work of Italian scholar Vincenzo Tomeo, The Judge on the Screen. Tomeo sets the scene by providing an overview of the fictional and cinematic versions of law in action focusing on the role of judges. His particularly novel concern is with how the public interpret films on the justice system.

He looks at the public’s reaction to four influential films on this topic. Two things to note. The research was carried out over 50 years ago. The films and audience were Italian. 

The Judge on the Screen preceded the attention paid to popular culture by other scholars by almost 20 years and provided empirical data some 30 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 -  Memories of Vincenzo Tomeo (Vincenzo Ferrari;) Il Giudice Sullo Schermo: A Classic in the Study of Popular Legal Culture, Finally Reborn (Ferdinando Spina) and Locating Vincenzo Tomeo’s “Il Giudice Sullo Schermo” in Law and Popular Culture Scholarship: A Personal Reflection (Peter Robson). This still remains one of the few in-depth pieces of research on such matters.

Despite its age, however, The Judge on the Screen remains a classic text well worth reading. Accompanied by essays by modern day film and law scholars this translation into English is a must for anyone who accepts, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, that a lawyer “without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason: if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect”.

The book is available from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.