Doyle and Tranter on #CK Your Family! The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility @GriffLawSchool

Kylie Doyle, Independent Scholar, and Kieran Mark Tranter, Griffith Law School, are publishing #CK Your Family!: The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility in volume 30 of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (2017). Here is the abstract.

This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalism's law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.