The law often seeks to keep sound contained and fixed, but sound has a way of leaking out. From the acoustic design of courtrooms to rules of evidence and norms of decorum in trial, the law determines what should be heard and what should not, in legal process as well as in everyday life. Sound can be an evanescent and unruly object, however, evading or penetrating our ears in unexpected ways. As a result, the law applies what I refer to as fictions of hearing – assumptions, ideas, and rules about sound that aim to manage it, but don’t always succeed.

While law purports to be a truth-finding practice, its operation routinely relies on fictions. Legal fictions are counterfactual assumptions that the law uses to facilitate process and create normative standards. These technologies of the law are widespread yet remain widely unspoken. As the legal scholar Cornelia Vismann notes, however, such practices and technologies may “bear witness to the essence of the law – and yet, at times, also testify against the law’s self-image.” (2011) I outline here three examples, of un-hearing, refusals to listen, and institutional mishearing, that testify about hierarchies of power and authority in the courtroom. These examples reveal how courts construct a Reasonable Listener: a person who hears in ways that are impossible, or at least only possible through the legal imagination.