Feigenson on Saying It With Pictures: Image and Text in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith

Neal Feigenson, Ouinnipiac University School of Law, has published Say It With Pictures: Image and Text in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. Here is the abstract.

The majority and dissenting opinions in the Supreme Court’s recent case on fair use, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, feature an unprecedented number of pictures: seventeen separate illustrations, almost all color photographs, and all but one embedded in the opinions instead of being relegated to an appendix. Images have appeared in SCOTUS opinions before, but never like this. This paper explores the functions and deeper significance of this outburst of visuality. In the two opinions, Justice Sotomayor’s for the majority and Justice Kagan’s dissent, the selections and sequences of the images tell very different stories of the dispute. The Justices also use their pictures to present their divergent theories of the case. No SCOTUS opinions have come close to using pictures this purposefully before, so it’s worth examining how the Justices did it here. Those pictures, of course, are surrounded by words. The pervasive picturing invites us, as no previous SCOTUS cases have, to think about the relationships between images and text in judicial opinions. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan verbally frame our viewing in contrasting ways. Not surprisingly, the words they use to refer to and describe the pictures they show underscore their opposing narratives and arguments. More than that, their words conceive of looking at pictures differently. Justice Sotomayor implies that we should regard her pictures simply as visual support for and authentication of her verbal claims. Justice Kagan, in contrast, exhorts us to really look at the pictures, a more active engagement that may make us more responsive to what pictures, perhaps especially pictures like Warhol’s, can do. Relatedly, their opinions reflect different ideas about pictorial meaning in general. For Justice Sotomayor, pictures just are (or, in this case, who what) they depict. This is characteristic of a naïve realist stance toward pictures. For Justice Kagan, pictorial meaning is a more complicated matter, emerging not only from what can be seen in the picture but also from the picture’s contexts, including expert commentary and other pictures. This matters for two reasons. First, while the Justices’ contrasting stances on pictorial meaning may follow from their opposing interpretations of the first fair use factor, the converse may also be true: They may approach fair use as they do in part because they have different ideas about pictorial meaning. Second, and more broadly, as pictures of all kinds play an ever greater role in legal proof and legal argument, getting decisions right depends on getting pictures right. What judges think pictures mean, and when it should even be part of their job to figure out what they mean, become increasingly important. Andy Warhol Foundation tells us something about this.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Chalmers on The Chameleon Subject: Representation, Law, and the Problem of Living Dead @MelbLawSchool

Shane Chalmers, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School, is publishing The Chameleon Subject — Representation, Law, and the Problem of Living Dead, in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This essay is concerned with the life of the subject that is always also an object. More specifically, it is concerned with the condition of being exposed to death by law, and how this is a condition of the living subject. The essay examines this condition through analysis of two photographs by Joseph Moise Agbodjélou and Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou. These photographs enable us to see how representation is critical to the emancipation of the subject, creating the conditions for the ‘customisation’ of existence. They also enable us to see how law, like photography, is not to be perfected by transcending its representational frameworks. The critical work is ensuring such frameworks remain media of an ‘autonomous subjectivation’. The autonomous subject here is the emancipated subject: a living dead figure whose ‘autonomy’ marks her off from the death-like petrifaction of mere representation without slipping into the conceit of a god-like subjectivity.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Tranter on Seeing Law: The Comic and Icon as Law @GriffLawSchool

Kieran Mark Tranter, Griffith Law School, is publishing Seeing Law: The Comic and Icon as Law in volume 33 of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (2017). Here is the abstract.

This special issue examines how the comic and the icon prefigure forms of legality that are different to modern law. There is a primal seeing of law unmediated by reading, writing or possibly thinking. This introduction identifies the primacy of the eye, the emergence of visual jurisprudence and the transformations of law as a paper-based material practice to a digitally enabled activity.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted (Lannoo Publishers, 2016) @Lannoo

ICYMI: Vanessa Paumen, Tine van Poucke, Stefan Huygebaert, and Georges Martyn have published The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted (Lammoo Publishers, 2016).  Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents (English).

'Law is an art, and the title The Art of Law reflects this concept: law reflected in art and law as an art.' Till-Holger Borchert, Director of Musea Brugge &; Renaat Landuyt, Mayor of the City of Bruges During the late-medieval period, law courts frequently commissioned paintings to grace their Aldermen chambers. Among the favourite themes were the so-called exempla iustitiae, examples of 'good' and 'bad' justice, derived from Biblical, historical and legendary tales. It was not until the Renaissance that the well-known image of Lady Justice took shape, recognised by her scales, sword and blindfold. In this book, depictions of the Last Judgement and other justice scenes, as well as allegories and visualisations of (sometimes gruesome) torture and execution practices are placed within an art-historical and legal-historical context. The authors' approaches to the highly popular theme of law and justice will appeal to both experts and novices with the subjects. For the exhibition, more than 120 works from Belgian and international collections, including private collections, are brought together, with masterpieces from Bruges forming the core of the exhibition.

Here is a link to a description of the book (original Dutch).

Mulcahy on Eyes of the Law: A Visual Turn in Socio-Legal Studies? @LindaMulcahy2

Linda Mulcahy, London School of Economics, Law Department, has published Eyes of the Law: A Visual Turn in Socio‐Legal Studies? at 44 Journal of Law and Society S111 (2017). Here is the abstract.

A number of sub‐disciplines have emerged in recent years with the specific goal of examining the visual dynamics of academic fields of inquiry. The turn to the visual masks a multitude of meanings about the significance of the image, ranging from new ways of defining a field of inquiry, to what constitutes legitimate sources for research or discussions of image production or visual prompts as a data collection method. This article asks what it means for socio‐legal scholars to engage with the image and the opportunity it might provide us with to see what law looks like from the perspective of law's subjects. These might include art installations in galleries, images of the places where justice is administered as well as photographs created by those who are subjected to legal regulation. In addition to a written essay I offer up three visual essays which can be read and contemplated with or without the written text which accompanies them.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

The Links Between Images and Social Justice

Seph Rodney interviews Sarah Lewis on the links between images and social justice, and how Professor Lewis's Harvard course on "Vision and Justice" translated into a similar but shorter course at the Brooklyn Public Library.

More here at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Sherwin on What Authorizes the Image? The Visual Economy of Post-Secular Jurisprudence @RKSherwin

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, is publishing What Authorizes the Image? The Visual Economy of Post-Secular Jurisprudence in Law and the Visual: Transitions and Transformations (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Here is the abstract.

In law’s visual economy our commitment to justice grows out of a renewed encounter with an interior libidinal source whose ongoing collective investment binds us to the nomos in which we live. We experience this corporeal bond in paintings, films, and video images on screens large and small. In the ethically inflected aesthetic of post-secular jurisprudence, justice is to law as beauty is to art. As distant as an abstract expressionist canvas, as close as any neighbor, or indeed any screen on which the neighbor becomes real to us. That is where we behold the source and instantiation of law’s judgment and authority.

Download the essay at the link.

d'Aspremont @JdA_IntLaw and De Brabandere @EDBrabandere on The Paintings of International Law

Jean d'Aspremont, University of Manchester School of Law, and University of Amsterdam, and Eric De Brabandere, Leiden University, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, are publishing The Paintings of International Law in International Law's Objects: Emergence, Encounter and Erasure through Object and Image (Hohmann and Joyce eds., Oxford University Press, 2017). Here is the abstract.

Using data drawn from the catalogues of the main publishers of international law books, this short essay focuses on the imagery used in the design of international law books and the way it contributes to the aesthetics of international legal argumentation. This essay zeroes in on the paintings that are reproduced on the cover of international law books with a view to unravelling some of the dynamics of the aesthetics of international legal argumentation. It argues that the greatest driver in the choice for the imagery of a book cover is the game which the author wants to play with the reader. It is argued that authors commonly use the cover page of their international law books, not only to illustrate their work but, more fundamentally, to attract readers into a game where the readers themselves create an explanatory narrative around the book.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Conference on the Art of Law, Bruges, Groeningemuseum, January 16-18, 2017

Announcement:


CONFERENCE: The Art of Law (Bruges, Groeningemuseum, 16-18 Jan 2017)

The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law & Justice in Context from the Middle Ages to the First World War

Recent years have witnessed a clear rise in scholarship on law and the visual, mostly originating in the wider field of law and the humanities. The conference The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law & Justice in Context from the Middle Ages to the First World War wishes to contribute to this research by focusing on imagery in its legal and art historical contexts. The program brings together original and interdisciplinary scholarship that questions the role of art in the practice of law, jurisprudence and justice administration from the Late Middle Ages through the Nineteenth Century.

The conference will be held in the Groeningemuseum, Bruges on Monday 16, Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 January, 2017, during the exhibition De Kunst van het Recht. Drie Eeuwen Gerechtigheid in Beeld (The Art of Law. Three Centuries of Justice Depicted) (28 October, 2016 – 5 February, 2017). This art exhibition, curated by Vanessa Paumen and Tine Van Poucke, features about 130 artworks from over 30 national and international museums and libraries and will focus on themes related to justice as expressed in artworks of various media from about 1450 through 1750.

The Art of Law is the closing conference of the IAP Justice and Populations’s WP4: Long-term (Self-)Representations of Justice (LongTermJust).

The conference is supported by
•    Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS
•    Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
•    Flemish Research Centre for the Arts of the Burgundian Netherlands
•    IAP Justice and Populations: The Belgian Experience in International Perspective


See conference website (taolconference.wordpress.com) for final program, registration and practical details.

Framing Law and Crime: An Interdisciplinary Anthology--New From Fairleigh Dickinson University Press @RLPGBooks

New:

Framing Law and Crime: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Caroline Joan "Kay" S. Picart, Michael Hviid Jacosen, and Cecil Greek, eds.; Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

This cutting-edge edited collection brings together 17 scholarly essays on two of cinema and television’s most enduring and powerful themes: law and crime. With contributions by many of the most prominent scholars in law, sociology, criminology, and film, Framing Law and Crime offers a critical survey of a variety of genres and media, integrating descriptions of technique with critical analysis, and incorporating historical and socio-political critique. The first set of essays brings together accounts of the history of the Law and Cinema Movement; the groundbreaking genre of “post-apocalyptic fiction;” and the policy-setting genesis of a Canadian documentary. The second section of the book turns to the examination of a range of international or global films, with an eye to assessing the strengths, frailties, and possible functions of law, as depicted in fictional cinema. After an international focus in the second section, the third section focuses on law and crime in American film and television, inclusive of both fictional and documentary modes of narration. This section’s expansion beyond film narratives to include television series attempts to broaden the scope of the edited collection, in terms of media discussed; it is also a nod to how the big screen, although still a dominant force in American popular culture, now has to compete, to some extent, with the small screen, for influence over the collective American popular cultural imaginary. The fourth section, titled brings together various chapters that attempt to instantiate how a “Gothic Criminology” could be useful, as an interpretative framework in analyzing depictions of law and crime in film and television. The fifth and final section covers issues of pedagogy, epistemology, and ethics in relation to moving images of law and crime. Merging wide-ranging analyses with nuanced scholarly interpretations, Framing Law and Crime examines key concepts and showcases original research reflecting the latest interdisciplinary trends in the scholarship of the moving image. It addresses, not only scholars, but also fans, and will heighten the appreciation of connoisseurs and newcomers to these topics alike.

Forthcoming from Routledge: Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture, and Representation (2017)

Forthcoming from Routledge: Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation (William Macneil, Timothy Peters, and Karen Crawley, 2017). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world’s leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these ‘readings’ of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with ‘harmless entertainment’. Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs, recognising and combatting structural injustices, and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.

Berger-Walliser, Barton, and Haapio on Visualization and Legal Design

Gerlinde Berger-Walliser, University of Connecticut, Thomas D. Barton, California Western School of Law, and Helena Haapio, University of Vaasa, Department of Economics and Business Law; Lexpert, Ltd., are publishing From Visualization to Legal Design: A Collaborative and Creative Process in volume 54 of the American Business Law Journal (2017). Here is the abstract.

Although the law remains predominately focused on the written word, a growing body of scholarship and legal practice reflect a dramatic increase in the use of visualization in virtually every legal context. Three starting assumptions underpin our ideas of implementing visualization ideas and techniques into what we call “Legal Design” that may aid contract simplification: First, we examine the use of images in business documents and in statutes, rather than for advocacy. Moving away from adversarial settings offers several advantages. It permits us to illustrate the use of images in a broader range of practical legal applications. It also enables us to adopt the thinking, values, and methods of a non-traditional approach to lawyering and the law: “Preventive Law” or “Proactive Law” (combined here as “PPL”). Second, we offer guidelines for using images in conjunction with words rather than in isolation, since the law only rarely abandons its verbal expression. Realistically, visualization is almost always used in hybrid ways — combinations of words and images to enhance the effectiveness of communication. That seems unlikely to change, given the need for detail and refinement when the law is imposing duties on people. Finally, our method analyzes variables surrounding choices and consequences about the process of generating, transmitting, and using images to accompany legal language. Examining this dynamic can deepen our understanding of the information conveyed; it can also reveal the potential of visualization for creating spillover value for businesses or regulatory agencies that employ the images to advance legal and organizational effectiveness.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Readers Take On a Challenge: Designing Covers For Christie's Mysteries

The Guardian asked its readers to design book covers for Agatha Christie's mysteries. Here are some of the results.

Graphing Little Red Riding Hood

Krisztina Szűcs, a Budapest-based data visualization designer, provides an interesting graphic interpretation of five different versions of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale here.  You can see more clearly the differences in violence, the parties, and the outcomes, depending on who's telling the story.

Images of Liberty

Steven Douglas Smith, University of San Diego School of Law, has published Constitution Day: 'The Image of Liberty' as San Diego Legal Studies Paper 15-196. Here is the abstract.

This Constitution Day talk compares the state of constitutional governance today to that of the Roman Empire, as famously discussed by the historian Edward Gibbon, and discusses alternative strategies that might be contemplated by those who believe that current American governance does not conform to the requirements of the historical Constitution.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The Rights of Privacy and Publicity

Samantha Barbas, SUNY Buffalo School of Law, has published Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford University Press, 2015). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Americans have long been obsessed with their images—their looks, public personas, and the impressions they make. This preoccupation has left its mark on the law. The twentieth century saw the creation of laws that protect your right to control your public image, to defend your image, and to feel good about your image and public presentation of self. These include the legal actions against invasion of privacy, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. With these laws came the phenomenon of "personal image litigation"—individuals suing to vindicate their image rights. Laws of Image tells the story of how Americans came to use the law to protect and manage their images, feelings, and reputations. In this social, cultural, and legal history, Samantha Barbas ties the development of personal image law to the self-consciousness and image-consciousness that has become endemic in our media-saturated culture of celebrity and consumerism, where people see their identities as intertwined with their public images. The laws of image are the expression of a people who have become so publicity-conscious and self-focused that they believe they have a right to control their images—to manage and spin them like actors, politicians, and rock stars.

 

Images and Imagination in Theorizing About Law: A Workshop at Wolfson College, Oxford

From Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary College, University of London, news of a workshop on images in legal scholarship, to take place at Wolfson College, Oxford, on May 20, 2015. Here's a description. If you are interested, sign up soon: only a few spots are left.

Images and Imagination in Theorizing about Law Workshop

20 May 2015

Time: 10:30am - 7:00pm 
Venue: Haldane Room, Wolfson College, Linton Road, Oxford, OX2 6UD

This one-day workshop will examine the role of images in legal scholarship, both theoretically and historically. By bringing together legal and art history academics, it will establish a new network of scholars from a variety of disciplines—art, history, law, anthropology—interested in the intersection of images and law.

The last decade has seen much research into the intersection of the visual and the legal, yet the impact on the practice of contemporary legal scholarship has been limited, and there is little methodological reflection on the roles that images and imagery have played in scholarship about law.

For the first time in the UK, this workshop will explore these issues with legal scholars, art historians, art theorists, visual epistemologists, anthropologists, and explore future avenues of research.

This workshop is co-organised by Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Oxford) and Dr Maks Del Mar (Queen Mary).

Participants

o    Dr Carolin Berhmann (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz)

o    Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Oxford)

o    Professor Denis Galligan (Oxford)

o    ​Professor Adam Gearey (Birkbeck)

o    Professor Peter Goodrich (Cardozo)

o    Dr Maks Del Mar (Queen Mary)

o    Professor Marie Laure Mathieu (Montpellier)

o    Professor Fernanda Pirie (Oxford)

o    Professor Geoffrey Samuel (Kent)

o    Dr Clare Sandford-Couch (Northumbria)

o    Professor Mathias Siems (Durham)

o    Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris (Kent)

o    Dr Patricia Cain

o    Ms Sophie Arkette (Artist in residence, Cambridge)

o    Dr Thomas Giddens (St Mary’s)

Programme

10:30–11:00 Tea and Coffee

11:00–12:00 Keynote speaker
Dr Carolin Berhmann, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenze
Title: ‘Nomos of Images’

12:05–1:05 Keynote speaker
Dr Clare Sandford-Couch, Northumbria University
Title: ‘Images and Legal Authority in Fourteenth Century Florence’

1:05–2:00 Lunch

2:00–4:30 Short presentations with breaks

Panel 1
Dr Patricia Cain, Artist
Title: ‘Practices of Thinking: Law and Art’

Ms Sophie Arkette, Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence, Centre for Intellectual Property & Information Law, University of Cambridge
Title: ‘Appearance v Materiality: On the Nature of Fixation in UK & Dutch Copyright Law’

Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Kent Law School
Title: ‘Graphic Legal Interdisciplinarity’

Panel 2
Professor Fernanda Pirie, Oxford University
Title: ‘Visual Regularity in Tibetan Legal Documents’

Professor Geoffrey Samuel, University of Kent
Title: ‘The Use of Images in Legal Reasoning’

Dr Thomas Giddens, St Mary’s University, Twickenham
Title: ‘Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Navigating the Limits of Rational Text with Graphic Fiction’

Panel 3
Professor Denis Galligan, Oxford University
Title: ‘On Trial for Treason: The Unlikely Alliance of John Lilburne and Edward Coke’

Professor Adam Gearey, Birkbeck, University of London
Title: ‘Once Poor Always Poor: Images of Law and Poverty in George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier”’

Professor Mathias Siems, Durham University
Title: ‘Mapping Law Visually’

Panel 4
Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Oxford University
Title: TBA

Dr Maks Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London
Title: ‘Visualising the Common Law Tradition’

4:30–5:00 Tea and Coffee

5:00–6:00 Keynote speaker
Professor Marie-Laure Mathieu, University of Montpellier
Title: ‘Images in Legal Reasoning’

6:00–7:00 Keynote speaker
Professor Peter Goodrich, Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law
Title: ‘Imago Decidendi- Pictures as Precedents’

7:00 Closing remarks

How to book

To reserve your place, please visit The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society website.

Here is a registration link: www.fjls.org/images-and-law

____________________________________

Dr. Maksymilian Del Mar

Senior Lecturer in Law and Philosophy

Director, Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context

Academic Fellow (2013-16), The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple

Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London

Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 20 7882 3962; Fax: +44 20 7882 7042

Email: m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk

Law and Its Relationship To the Image

Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, University of Oxford, is publishing Law, Justice and the Pervasive Power of the Image in Journal of Law and Social Research (2014). Here is the abstract.

It is not commonplace for works of legal scholarship to use images to aid and clarify their analysis of law. Yet, law is a cultural entity, as much an art as a science. It is rooted in images as firmly as in rules.

However, law’s relationship to the image is complicated. Law may itself be interpreted as an art form, one of the liberal arts, but that is not all that it is. Law makes use of images, but is not reducible to images. Nor can art be straightforwardly compared to law. There exists no unambiguous analogy between art and law, and there are of course many points of difference between them. Peter Fitzpatrick suggests the relationship between law and culture is an uneasy one, with an ‘edgy quality’, and the same might be said of the relationship of law and image.

In this article, I argue that, while law’s own management of images must be scrutinised with care, law itself may be illuminated, enhanced or undermined by the work that images do, and our own understanding of law thus enriched, or even destabilised. To understand it through the medium of images adds a density and a complexity to our comprehension of law, and reveals tacit assumptions, incongruities and solecisms in the workings of the law. I use a selection of images and art works to make these points.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.