by Sora Han
Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts is an experiment in the study of how sound decomposes the words of law. The sound recordings used here were taken from evidence collected during investigations into the deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Terence Crutcher, Samuel Debose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling. While legal interpretation of these recordings strip them of self-evidentiary meaning, their recomposed repetition here force an encounter with a form of evidence I call, res nulla loquitur, ‘the no-thing speaks.’ Their indestructible questions refuse to settle for and in whatever the law offers as justice.
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Res Nulla Loquitur is a prelude to the article, “North County Jail,” forthcoming in boundary 2.
Sora Han is Chair of the Department of African American Studies, and Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program and the School of Law at UC Irvine. She is the author of Mu: 49 Lines of Flight (forthcoming) and Letters of the Law (2015), and a co-author of Lacan and Mahayana Buddhist Thought (2022) and the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, 3rd Edition (2020).
