How do we hear the law? How does the law listen? What is heard and what is not? Law’s relationship with literature, architecture, and visual art is well established, but researchers have only recently begun exploring connections between law and sound. James Parker’s 2015 work on acoustic jurisprudence has paved the way for inquiry into the role of listening, voice, music, silence, and audiovisual technologies in legal process. This LCH session explores new research on sound and the law. Tareeq Jalloh (Oxford) presents research on the safety panic of drill music and its subsequent criminalisation. He presents a taxonomy of claims underpinning drill music’s criminalisation, arguing that law enforcement’s responses to drill are erroneous, irresponsible and racist. Nomi Dave (Oxford) and Ryan Smith (Columbia) share their work on law’s reasonable listening, detailing what they term ‘fictions of hearing’ that the law maintains to regulate sound. Based on recent examples from the US justice system, these constructs and assumptions reveal how the law attempts to limit sound’s agency, and how sound evades legal expectations.