The Obscure Word History of “In Camera” Court Proceedings

I’ve always wondered what a camera has to do with in camera court proceedings. Surely taking a photo, or video, of the court case would make it more public rather than less so?

As with many legal terms this is one the Romans gave us. In camera simply means in private but how can camera mean private? The word camera entered English fairly late, during the 1700s, to describe a building with a vaulted or arched ceiling. It had, at this point, nothing to do with photography. They borrowed it from the Latin word camera which gives room words to Italian ( camera), Spanish ( camara), French ( chambre). I was surprised to find it donated a similar word to Old Irish ( camra) but when I thought about the modern Irish word for room ( seomra) it does make sense.

The Latin word actually came from Greek roots ( kamara), so we have to give the Greeks some credit too.

Shortly after it’s arrival, camera did get entangled with the early years of photography thanks to the camera obscura. This literally translates as a dark chamber. I’m not an expert on this technique but apparently is involves a black box with a lens which projects images inside the box of objects outside the box. I’ve a vague memory of entering one (perhaps at the London Science Museum?) and the image was inverted. There’s a very popular one in Edinburgh.

A camera obscura isn’t a camera in the modern sense as there’s no image retained afterwards. An advance on that was the camera lucide (light chamber) which used prisms to project an image onto paper beneath the contraption so it could be traced.

The camera obscura was often shortened to just camera and when modern photography hit its stride around 1840, the word camera was adopted for photographic equipment. Later it was also used for motion picture devices and of course now we all carry cameras in our pockets thanks to mobile phones, something they could only dream of back in the early 1700s.

While sometimes court proceedings, particularly these days, are filmed using cameras, when a case, or part of a case, is held in camera what it means is that the hearing will be held in a private room, often in the judge’s chamber for various legal reasons such as privacy for younger witnesses or to argue obscure legal arguments without unduly influencing the jurors.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace

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Revised for Medium, but originally published at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com on April 26, 2021.