Hargreaves, Robert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8778-7417 (2026) Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For? Recognition, Surveillance and Silence through a Therapeutic Jurisprudence Lens. Liverpool Law Review. (In Press)

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Abstract

Lionel Richie’s Hello (1984) asks a question that this article treats as jurisprudential, namely whom law is looking for, and whether it sees the person it finds. The video can be read in two registers. Read literally, as a lawyer reads a problem question, it depicts a teacher who covertly watches and anonymously telephones a blind student, conduct that engages safeguarding, harassment, privacy and equality law. Read as an affective artefact, the same conduct is offered to the viewer as tenderness, and the viewer’s sympathy is rewarded when the student sculpts the teacher’s head in clay and tells him, “This is how I see you.” Drawing on law and humanities and cultural legal studies scholarship, this article argues that the distance between these two readings is itself the proper object of therapeutic jurisprudence. Law’s protections depend on recognition in two senses, the recognition of conduct as harm and the recognition of the person as a subject rather than as a vulnerability to be managed. Through its organisation of sight and voice, Hello shows how a cultural form can defeat both, substituting the viewer’s warmth for the student’s own perception. Disability is the sharpest instance of this misrecognition, but the same structure governs the video’s treatment of authority and privacy. This article is a textual reading rather than a study of audiences, and its claims concern what the video invites rather than what viewers take from it.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) K Law > KD England and Wales
School/Department:	York Business School
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15960

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