February 11, 2016

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on Material Legal Metaphors

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster, Westminster Law and Policy Centre, has published Flesh of the Law: Material Legal Metaphors at 43 Journal of Law and Society 45 (2016). Here is the abstract.
Existing legal metaphors, even the predominantly spatial and corporeal ones, paradoxically perpetuate a dematerialized impression of the law. This is because they depict the law as universal, adversarial, and court‐based, thus ignoring alternative legalities. Instead, there is a need to employ more radically material metaphors, in line with the material turn in law and other disciplines, in order to allow law's materiality to come forth. I explore the connection between language and matter (the ‘flesh’ of the law) through legal, linguistic, and art theory, and conclude by suggesting four characteristics of material legal metaphors.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

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