Court draftsman
A court draftsman is a person who draws scenes from court proceedings.
job profile
A certain speed plays a role in the graphical representation of processes. The draftsman must focus on typical details of the process. You should also choose a seat in the courtroom that offers a good overview of what is happening. Nowadays, the profession of court draftsman is only practiced by relatively few people and mostly on a part-time basis. There is no special training for the activity of a court draftsman and no professional organization.
Legal background
For media use, these are the only available images from the court proceedings in Germany, since in Germany, in addition to making tape recordings, filming and photography are also prohibited in legal proceedings. This arises from Section 169 of the Courts Constitution Act (GVG), which establishes the principle of public disclosure, but at the same time, in sentence 2 since 1964, has declared sound and image recordings during the court hearing to be fundamentally inadmissible. According to the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court, the provision of Section 169 sentence 2 GVG does not violate the fundamental rights of freedom of broadcasting or freedom of information . In the opinion of the Federal Constitutional Court, impairments of these fundamental rights are justified by the conflicting personal rights of those involved in the court proceedings, the principle of a fair trial and the efficiency of the administration of justice, in particular the undisturbed finding of truth and justice.
In other countries, such as the USA , on the other hand, television recordings are permitted during the trial. In this context, the live coverage of the trial against OJ Simpson by the American television station Court-TV became particularly well known . Court draftsmen therefore do not have the same status there. However, they are also active there. When television cameras are filming the trial, they tend to focus on the circumstances beyond the cameras; for example the spectators or the relatives of the litigants.
Cultural history
The visual representation of law can be traced back to the Middle Ages, which in many ways was essentially image-oriented. However, the illustration of legal texts quickly declined at the latest with the advent of book printing and is hardly available today. The illustrations were not only aimed at lawyers, but also at laypeople and semi-laypeople. However, the most authentic representation possible of a legal process was not expected, more important were symbolic meanings and decorative effects.
While the importance of images for the representation of law declined, the representation of the law through the pamphlets of the 16th and 17th centuries, the allegorical representation of law up to legal caricature, for example by Honoré Daumier, increased. With the advent of the modern press and especially the tabloid press , commercial interest in the representation of high- volume criminal cases and trials increased. In 1869/70, for example, the French mass newspaper Le Petit Journal was able to increase the circulation from 357,000 to 594,000 copies through detailed reporting on the case of the murderer Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, through the discovery, trial up to and including the execution, and was able to position itself as a leader in the long term. This was also accompanied by the visual representation of the processes using graphic means, which is what today's court draftsman came about.
Erich Dittmann was considered one of the most important court illustrators in the Federal Republic of Germany .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Britta Mersch, student job court draftsman - The criminal in profile Spiegel Online - Unispiegel from March 22, 2007
- ↑ a b "Michael Jackson looks like a caricature" (interview with the American court illustrator Mona Shafer Edwards), Spiegel Online from June 2, 2006
- ↑ Christina Sticht, Bilder vom Mörder , Welt.de, July 13, 2003
- ↑ Job description on Jobber.de ( memento of the original dated August 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ BVerfG, judgment of January 24, 2001, Az. 1 BvR 2623/95 , BVerfGE 103, 44, NJW 2001, 1633; see. also Sabine Mohr, television coverage from the main hearing (Diss. University of Tübingen, 2004); Oliver Meier, On behalf of the audience - court broadcasts between fictionality and authenticity . Media issue from March 31, 2003 on this.
- ↑ Oliver Meier, On behalf of the audience - court broadcasts between fictionality and authenticity . Media issue from March 31, 2003 ; Also for criticism in the USA on Friday January 19, 2001.
- ↑ Röhl / Ulbrich, Pictures in Law and Pictures of Law , Rubin issue 1/2000 (PDF; 319 kB); Röhl / Ulbrich, pictures in historical legal books , building blocks for the project "visual legal communication", Ruhr University Bochum, chair for legal sociology and legal philosophy. ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Röhl / Ulbrich, pictures in historical legal books , building blocks for the project "Visual Legal Communication", Ruhr University Bochum, Chair for Legal Sociology and Legal Philosophy. ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Sylvia Valentin, Journalism in France in the 19th Century, The Change in the Press World in Critical Dialogue , Diploma Thesis, Vienna 2000, Chapter 3
- ↑ Erich Dittmann "Down with the black paragraph stallions" Drawings from German courts 1963-1999 Verlag CH Beck / Munich 2002 ISBN 3-406-48587-1 p. 7 ff.
literature
- Erich Dittmann "Down with the black paragraph stallions" Drawings from German courts 1963–1999 Verlag CH Beck / Munich 2002 ISBN 3-406-48587-1
- Cony Theis "Time aligning", exhibition in art in North Rhine-Westphalia, former Reichsabtei Aachen-Kornelimünster, Agathenburg Palace, Kunst- und Kunstgewerbeverein Pforzheim eV, texts by Karin Thomas, Wilhelm Schürmann, Olaf Möller and a lyrics by Nick Lowe, Salon-Verlag 2003 , ISBN 3-89770-200-2
