From Prohibition to Digitalisation: 100 Years of Cameras in the Courtroom

Abstract

This article traces the shifting relationship between the courts, the public, and the media in England and Wales from the 1925 prohibition on courtroom photography to the contemporary regime of livestreamed and recorded proceedings. It situates the introduction of the ban on courtroom images within the first administrative turn of the judiciary, when mechanised record‐keeping and the increasing use of photography by the mass media threatened to destabilise judicial authority, existing class relations, and the courts’ control over judicial meaning‐making. A century later, the return of cameras to the courtroom is analysed as part of a second administrative turn driven by digitalisation, datafication, and the transparency imperative. Rather than signalling a liberalisation of visual access, the reintroduction of cameras has been contingent on the judiciary's enhanced capacity to produce and control its own ‘administrative images’. Today, images of the courtroom operate simultaneously as instruments of surveillance and sources of data within a broader digital infrastructure of governance. The article argues that contemporary open justice, increasingly equated with transparency, no longer rests primarily on public observation of courts but on managed visibility through digital capture, thereby recasting the historic tension between law and images within the logic of algorithmic and data‐driven judicial administration.