Many of Orit Kamir’s publications analyze cinematic texts, exposing their fictional worlds’ underlying social and legal structures. Kamir’s reading applies critical and feminist perspectives, revealing underlying honor and/or dignity-based codes.

Most of these articles and book chapters present and develop Kamir’s unique version of the new, interdisciplinary field of research, “law-and-film”.  Law-and-film integrates legal and meta-legal analysis with critical literary and sociological discourses. Kamir develops three distinct strands of law and film, each entailing a distinctive point of view on “law films”.

One type of law-and-film analysis that Kamir suggests is analysis of law films that exposes them as powerful tools that assist in the indoctrination of their viewers into legalistic and judgmental modes of existence. Many law films, be their covert ideologies what they may, in fact invite their viewers to engage in judgment, thus “training” them in legalistic and judgmental practices. Often the judgment viewers are enticed to partake in evokes conservative, patriarchal social and legal norms that the films assume and take for granted. Kamir shows how important and influential law films (such as the Japanese Rashomon, the Hollywood Anatomy of A Murder or the Iranian A Separation) perform and accomplish all this.

Another type of  law-and-film project is the revelation of law films’ popular jurisprudence. Such jurisprudence, despite its popular avenue, may be thoughtful, sophisticated and innovative (as is the case in Barbara Streisand’s Nuts, or Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden). Yet another perspective suggested by Kamir is one that examines law and cinema’s parallel modes of operation. For example, both law and film may evoke a moral panic, or judge a rape victim. They may do so in different yet analogous ways, thus echoing and empowering each other.

These types of critical and feminist analysis of law films reveal how many films that seem entertaining (Simply Blonde) or even progressive (Adam’s Rib) may, in fact, advance conservative world views. They also reveal how, as any complex, multilayered text, a film may perform several different social tasks that don’t necessarily coincide.

Kamir’s most extensive work that presents this version of law-and-film is her book Framed: Women in Law and Film.