Resnik on On Darkness and LIght in Legal Imagination and Practice @YaleLawSch

Judith Resnik, Yale University Law School, is publishing On Darkness and Light in Legal Imagination and Practice: A Foreword to the Dark Sides of the Law in The Dark Sides of the Law: Perspectives on Law, Literature, and Justice in Common Law Countries (Geraldine Gadbin-George, Yvonne-Marie Rogez, Armelle Sabatier & Claire Wrobel, eds., Paris: Editions, Michel Houdiard, 2019).

This Foreword, building on the book Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, explores the social constructions of “darkness” and of “lightness.” One illustration comes from how darkness has been valorized as well as bemoaned in the iconography of courthouses. While once the Virtue Justice was insistently displayed as clear-eyed, that figure’s eyes are now often obscured by a blindfold. When blindfolds were attached to Justice figures in the Renaissance, that deployment was derisive. Today, the blindfold is celebrated as an appropriate marker of the special role of a judge. The shifting import of the darkness imposed by blindfolds reflects changing ideas about the relationship of judges to the sovereignties that employ them and about the impact of sight on knowledge. The Foreword maps these changes before turning to the use of glass in building design. As the images reproduced make plain, glass facades ought not to be confused with phenomenal transparency. Glaring light, as well as darkness, can make exercises of authority unobservable.

Download the Foreword from SSRN at the link.

Khorakiwala on Judicial Iconography and Access to Justice in the Bombay High Court

Rahela Khorakiwala, Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences/Max Planck Institute for European Legal History; Jawaharlal Nehru University, has published Judicial Iconography and Access to Justice in the Bombay High Court at 7 Südasien-Chronik/South Asia Chronicle 351 (2017)

In this paper I argue that certain aspects of the judicial iconography of the Bombay High Court and its practices hinder access to justice. The idea of access to justice that I refer to, is the physical accessibility of the court building which is read through Franz Kafka’s parable on Before the Law. Further, the article focuses on the public interest litigation that has been filed in the Bombay High Court for the creation of a new high court building. Based on my ethnographic study, I look at the restrictions through the visual in the form of the dress worn by judges and lawyers and the ban on photography in court premises. In conclusion, I discuss the idea of law as heritage and how the Bombay High Court deals with its iconography in relation to its heritage and eventually, how this affects the process of access to justice.

. The full text is not available from SSRN.

Poon on How a Body Becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images @juselk

ICYMI:

Justine Poon, Australian National University College of Law, has published How a Body Becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images, at 30 Law & Literature 105 (2018).  Here is the abstract.

Asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat to seek protection have been the catalyst for significant legal reform and the proliferation of political discourses. The paper analyses the metaphor of the boat as being a common trope in the legislative category of the “unauthorized maritime arrival” and in the government images that advertised this legal change. The figure of the boat effaces the asylum-seeker's body from the frame of law and discourse and constructs a myth about sovereignty and borders that enables coercive control over asylum seeker bodies.

Zeno-Zencovich on Data Visualization and Legal Epistemology

Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, University of Rome III-Department of Law, has published Through a Lawyer's Eyes: Data Visualization and Legal Epistemology 459 in Law, Norms, and Freedoms in Cyberspace/Droit, Normes, et Libertes dans le Cybermonde: Liber Amicorum Yves Poulet (Elise Degrave, Cecile de Terwangne, Severine Dusolier, et Robert Querck, eds., Larcier, 2018).

The article aims at investigating the relationship between the law and its visual depiction, in the light of the growing use of vast amounts of data to represent social phenomena. Visual analytics and infographics are part of contemporary forms of representation and knowledge. To what extent can lawyers do - or should do - without them and what profit, instead, might they take from them?

Download the essay 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.

Imagining Literary Characters, With the Assistance of a Police Artist

Via @christianbok

The nice thing about fiction is that it allows you to imagine in your mind's eye what characters look like, even though authors do often provide you with some notion of those characters' physical attributes. Thus, the arguments over whether one actor or another should play the role in the inevitable movie. But what happens if a police sketch artist, or someone doing a similar job, tries her hand at producing images of literary characters, using the type of kit that police artists use to assist witnesses in identifying suspects? Brian Davis has done just that. Here are some of his results.

More about a police or forensic artist's work here.

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.

Thomas Giddens @ThomGiddens on Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing (Routledge, 2017)

Routledge is publishing a wealth of really interesting books in the area of law and the humanities this year and next. Here's another.

Thomas Giddens, St. Mary's University, is publishing On Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing (2017) (due next summer or autumn). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Law brings certainty to life. Its production of and reliance upon rational text as the predominant way of knowing about, and thus judicially managing, the world enables law to give practical and certain answers to difficult and complex moral, judicial and philosophical questions. But law’s conscious ‘certainty’ involves the denial of alternative ways of knowing, and a repression of the aesthetic and the visual within dominant forms of legal knowledge. Tapping into the recent ‘turn’ towards literary, cultural and visual concerns in legal studies, this book examines the critical value that comics can bring to law. Situated in-between the rational, textual, aesthetic and the visual, comics are, this book demonstrates, uniquely able to explore the limits of the legal text; and, in expanding legal discourse, to offer new ways of figuring the future of law.

Call For Papers: Conference on Images, Copyright, and the Public Domain in the Long Nineteenth Century, March 29-30, 2018

Via IP and IT Conferences Blog posted by Saurabh Vishnubhakat

 

 

Call for Papers: Images, Copyright, and the Public Domain in the Long Nineteenth Century

Call for Papers: Images, Copyright, and the Public Domain in the Long Nineteenth Century

Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
Abstracts: February 1, 2017
Notifications: June 1, 2017
Conference: March 29-30, 2018

In partnership with LARCA (Laboratoire de recherches sur les cultures anglophones), Université Paris Diderot

Background

A combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors during the long nineteenth century made images more readily available in a wider range of media than ever before. These transformations raised new questions about the ownership and use of images.

Working in the new field of lithography, artists produced portraits, topographical landscapes, caricatures, everyday scenes, and representations of events done “on the spot,” which publishers distributed quickly and relatively cheaply. Thanks to changes in printing techniques and the commercial strategies of publishers, engraved images became more common in books, magazines, and newspapers. The development of photography led to the production and circulation of images in the form of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and stereographs. The quest to reproduce photographic images in print inspired numerous photomechanical processes that raised questions about the status of the image and its creator. Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated printed reproductions of visual works raised new questions about what constituted “authorship” under copyright law; about how to balance the interests of artists, distributors, and collectors; and about how to protect the privacy of individuals whose images were being reproduced and displayed in public. As images and the techniques used to produce them spread across national borders, the question of colonial and international copyright became increasingly important.

Current Project

This project aims to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines and fields (printing history, art history, law, literature, visual culture, book history, etc.) to explore the cultural and legal consequences of the proliferation of images in the long nineteenth century. Our geographic focus will be on Great Britain and the United States in connection with the wider world, not only their colonies and territories, but also their commercial and artistic links with other countries. Contributions that consider the transnational circulation of images, or provide a comparative perspective on copyright, are most welcome, as are case studies that reveal the local factors that shaped attitudes and practices related to the circulation of images. In referring to the “long 19th century,” we want to encourage specialists of earlier and later periods to help us elucidate the broader history of imaging and printing techniques and the legal and cultural norms that surrounded them.

Event Details

As the first stage in the project, we invite interested scholars to propose papers for a conference to be held at Winterthur Museum, Delaware, March 29-30, 2018. Following the conference, authors will be invited to revise papers for possible publication in a special issue of a journal on this topic. In the spring of 2019, a follow-up workshop for contributors will be held at Université Paris Diderot, with the goal of finalizing the joint publication and discussing further research opportunities in this field.

The following list is in no way exhaustive, but reveals some potential lines of inquiry:

• To what extent did changes in imaging and printing techniques affect the status of images as understood by those who made them and those who viewed them?
• What norms did artists, architects, photographers, engravers and others establish to govern the circulation and reproduction of their works?
• How were copyright and/or patent law understood by the people who produced, distributed, and viewed images of various kinds?
• Was there a sense of a “public domain” in the realm of visual culture, and if so how was this articulated?
• How did attitudes toward the authorship and attribution of images evolve during this period?
• What were the perceived boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate copying, and how did these vary across media?
• In cases where the law was silent or ambiguous, what cultural practices and commercial strategies were developed, either to promote the ownership of images or to contest it?

Submission Instructions

• Please send an abstract (one page) of your proposed contribution and a short CV (two pages) to imagecopy19@gmail.com by February 1, 2017.
• We will notify accepted participants by June 1, 2017.
• Questions may be addressed to imagecopy19@gmail.com.

Co-conveners

• Stephanie Delamaire, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
• Will Slauter, LARCA, Univ. Paris Diderot

A Website Devoted To Judicial Images

Via Maks Del Mar @maksdelmar: A terrific website devoted to judicial images: Judicial Images: Production, Management, & Consumption. 

Check it out.

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.

Ari Ezra Waldman on Copyright Law and Revenge Porn

Ari Ezra Waldman, New York law School, has published Images of Harassment: Copyright Law and Revenge Porn at 23 Federal Bar Council Quarterly 15 (Sept./Oct./Nov. 2015). Here is the abstract.

Nonconsensual pornography, commonly known as “revenge porn,” usually occurs when an individual (usually a man) publicly posts online sexually explicit images of his former partner (usually a woman). Although normally the stuff of tort law, revenge porn offers copyright attorneys opportunities to help victims, as well: the offending images are often selfies taken by the victim and thus covered by the victim’s copyright. There is, to date, no Second Circuit case law on the subject, making this area uniquely suited to creative social impact litigation. Until state legislatures or Congress pass well-drafted criminal revenge porn statutes, copyright law remains a necessary though inadequate weapon to combat revenge porn in the Second Circuit and elsewhere.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.