01482nam a22001457a 4500 531874 531874 251106b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Trabsky, Marc Gaylor, Averyl 57708 Forensic radiology and the testimony of shadows Social & Legal Studies 34(5), Oct, 2025: p.695-713 This article examines how radiological images became accepted by courts as visual evidence of death in the 20th century. Initially conceived as a speciality of photography, X-rays confounded courts, eliciting a range of judicial responses, from outright refusal to consider the images as any kind of evidence, to mocking them as cheap parlour tricks for an unwitting public, to recognising them as more reliable than the testimony of the expert witness. The article contends that courts moved towards recognising X-rays as proof of death only by both affirming forensic radiology's promise of ‘mechanical objectivity’ while acknowledging its reliance on the fallibility of ‘human subjectivity’. We suggest that this history has broader implications in socio-legal studies for comprehending how the invention of novel optical techniques continues to problematise legal epistemologies of death in the 21st century.- Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09646639241287009 Death, Law, Evidence, Forensics, X-rays, Photography, Epistemology 57709 Social & Legal Studies AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 407063 IIPA IIPA 2025-11-06 34(5), Oct, 2025: p.695-713 AR137512 2025-11-06 AR