Reminder: Call For Abstracts, Law and Visual Jurisprudence, Due December 1, 2021

 

Springer Law Book Series:

LAW AND VISUAL JURISPRUDENCE

 

 

Aesthetics of Law in External Frame: From Methodology to Manifestations

 

Editors: Anne Wagner & Kamil Zeidler

 

 

Department of the Theory and Philosophy of the State and Law Faculty of Law and Administration

University of Gdańsk, Poland

 

 

This call for papers is intended as an opportunity for dialogue and exchange of views in the field of various manifestation of law in the broad understood art or related to art, which are captured within the aesthetics of law. In view of the topics suggested in the call, we propose this book with the aim of promoting an interdisciplinary and fresh approach to the subject of aesthetics of law, in the following perception of it.

The juxtaposition of law and aesthetics from the very beginning raised many doubts and controversies, resulting mainly from the fact that aesthetics, associated primarily with art, shows incredible plasticity and changeability, while the law is characterized by a certain rigidity and formalism. The possibility of combining law and aesthetics was born, which grew out of pragmatic aesthetics, one of the contemporary theories of perception of aesthetics, which was born in the twentieth century. According to its assumptions, aesthetics is no longer only associated with art and a work of art and the aesthetic experiences that accompany them, but even the leading theses of pragmatic aesthetics have become de-aestheticization of art and aestheticization of everyday life. The development of pragmatic aesthetics has meant that aesthetic experiences, unsatisfied with art, will be satisfied in a different way, with the help of objects and phenomena surrounding the recipient. As a result, the law, omnipresent in everyday life, has become the subject of aesthetics.

The aesthetics of law actually appears as one of the parts of the philosophy of law that focuses on the relationship between law and aesthetical values, in their broadest sense. The aesthetics of law can be closed in its three dimensions: external, internal and the approach defined as “law as a tool of aestheticization”. The aesthetics of law in an external dimension deals with all manifestations of law, its motives, symbols and legal inspirations that have been

presented for centuries in the fine arts. It cannot be denied that in the history of painting, sculpture, literature and film, there are countless examples of works in which the source of artistic inspiration was the broadly understood issue of law. Law can therefore be a material for art and, just like art, affect its recipients, shaping their perception of law, precisely by means of how it is presented in a given work. In internal dimension, the subject of the aesthetics of law is the law itself, treated as a carrier of aesthetic values and corresponding experiences and evaluations, and legal activity itself can thus be treated as a creative activity. The third dimension refers to the law as “tool of aestheticization” of everyday life, which indicates the aesthetic function of law, implemented mainly by legal regulation and the legal norms they contain, which are the determinants of what is aesthetic.

 

This book is going to focus only on the external dimension of aesthetics of law, as a very broad and interdisciplinary field. The main aim of this book is to show various combinations of law with broadly understood art. A fresh and innovative look is important and highly desirable here – both methodological and empirical, focused on manifestations and examples of the aesthetics of law in external frames. Taking this into account, in an attempt to encourage the submission of papers, we invite participants to considers issues in the following grounds:

·        Law in art,

·        Law in literature,

·        Law in film,

·        Visualization of law,

·        Possible methodology in external dimension of the aesthetics of law,

·        Sociological aspects of the external dimension to the aesthetics of law.

 

Submissions following these themes as well as other possible ways of analysis related to the above topics will be welcomed.

Abstracts of 500 words (max.) should be submitted by [1^st December 2021] to Kamil Zeidler (kamil.zeidler@ug.edu.pl) with decisions made by [1^st February 2022].

Chapters should be no longer than 15,000 words (including footnotes, summary, references etc.).

The deadline for full papers is: [31^st May 2022]

Brunschwig on Visual Law and Legal Design: Questions and Tentative Answers

Colette R. Brunschwig, University of Zurich, Department of Law, Centre for Legal History, Legal Visualization Unit, has published Visual Law and Legal Design: Questions and Tentative Answers in Proceedings of the 24th International Legal Informatics Symposium IRIS 2021 179-230 (Erich Schweighofer, Franz Kummer, Ahti Saarenpää, Stefan Eder, and Philip Hanke, Bern: Editions Weblaw, 2021). Here is the abstract.

This paper rests on three premises: First, ongoing digitalization is unleashing visualization (still or moving images) and audio visualization (videos, audiovisual animations, etc.). This massive technological development is also initiating multi sensorization (humanoid robots, virtual realities, etc). Second, visual law and legal design are still largely unknown as fi elds of scholarly inquiry to many legal and non-legal actors. My paper therefore uses “visual law” and “legal design” as working terms to delineate these fi elds. Third, I take an etymological approach to the word “responsible” featuring in the conference title of the International Symposion on Legal Informatics 2020 as it implies a quality that is required of digitalization. The English adjective “responsible” comes from the Latin verb respondēre, whose meanings include answering (responding) and corresponding to something. Based on these premises, this paper explores four key questions: How does current legal research respond to visualization? What are visual law and legal design? How are visual law and legal design similar or diff erent? What should visual lawyers or legal designers do to act responsibly in the face of ongoing digitalization? Tackling these questions yields new insights for the debate on legal visualization. The answers given in this paper reveal how various basic legal disciplines and law-and areas gravitate around this topic. The answers also demonstrate that the insights of the basic legal disciplines and law-and areas are or should be interconnected. Taking such steps will promote not only visualization itself but also interdisciplinary legal research on this important topic.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Murray on A New Methodology for the Analysis of Visuals in Legal Works @ukcollegeoflaw

Michael D. Murray, University of Kentucky College of Law, has published A New Methodology for the Analysis of Visuals in Legal Works. Here is the abstract.

The goal of this Article is to introduce a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of visuals used for communication in legal works, by which I mean transactional and litigation documents, legal instruments, primary and secondary sources of law, and legal informational materials. The new methodology has the following steps drawn from visual rhetoric, visual literacy, and mise en scène studies: Immediate Visual Context, Analysis of Meaning, Taxonomy of Purpose and Function, Immediate Verbal Context, Visual Cultural Context, Mise en Scène and the Rhetorical Topic of Arrangement, Visual Rhetoric and the Ethical and Professional Propriety of the Work. My intent in this Article and the methodology it presents is to examine visual elements as visuals, not as a translation or alternative form of verbal communication. The approach of trying to translate visual works into verbal arguments or verbal elements of legal reasoning limits the scope and the effectiveness of the visual works, because communication through visuals employs a separate visual language, and not in a literal or verbal sense. The methodology proposed in this Article is a set of tools that can help verbally-oriented law-trained writers to become better readers, evaluators, and creators of visual communications in the law. Keywords: visual rhetoric, visual legal rhetoric, visual literacy, multimodal, multimodality, proactive, Proactive Law, visualization, Legal Design, visual context, verbal context, visual cultural context, visualization in contracts, cartoon contracts, comic book contracts, Mise en Scène, diagrammatics

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Stramignoni on Images of Law

Igor Stramignoni, London School of Economics, Law Department, has published Images of Law. Here is the abstract.

In this essay, I offer some initial thoughts about what may be roughly called a visual history of law or, more precisely, a history of the visual in law. To put it simply, I am interested to turn to what may be generally called early modern “images of law” – broadly, constellations of artefacts to do with law – with the purpose of taking them seriously. What may those images suggest if taken on their own terms rather than as merely impassive historical evidence of the particular process of conceiving law intellectually or, alternatively, as codes for certain pre-existing messages to be subsequently decoded? In order to answer this question, I start from a particular and relatively little-known picture, moving on to a related literary tract, and then on again to a few of the more familiar early modern visual representations of justice. The point of this exercise is simply to highlight certain alternative ways of approaching artefacts to do with law that may add to those that may come more readily to mind – that is, as objects illustrating or demonstrating the long-standing process of modernisation and written rationalisation of law after the Middle Ages. On approaching those artefacts differently, we discover that they often resist our analyses or interpretations forcing us to engage with them in interesting ways.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Ducato on Brief Notes on Law and Visualisation @RossanaDucato

Rossana Ducato, Université Catholique de Louvain and Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles, has published De Iurisprudentia Picturata: Brief Notes on Law and Visualisation in the Journal of Open Access to Law, 2019. Here is the abstract.

Law is usually considered a textual phenomenon. From their first steps into a faculty of law students know they will have to prepare for exams on codes and text-books. In their practice lawyers have to formulate opinions, claims or defences in a document or in oral statements. Judges are called on to write decisions which will be read aloud in court and published. Notaries prepare (and confer authenticity on) legal documents and contracts for their clients. Legislators enact laws, decrees and regulations that consist of a series of rules expressed in verbal statements. Legal scholars write books, commentaries, essays and scientific articles starting from the literature review. However, a closer look at legal history demonstrates that textual form is not the only way in which legal concepts and knowledge can be expressed. The goal of the paper is to present how the interplay between law and visualisation can be structured and introduce the contributions to the JOAL first issue on visual law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

New Springer Law Book Series, "Law and Visual Jurisprudence" Launched @AnneWag26082949

From Anne Wagner, Research Associate Professor, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (CGU Calais)

Dear All,

it is with great privilege that we announce the official launch of a new Law Book Series, of which Sarah Marusek and I are the Series Editors. This Book Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence  (Springer) is a long-term project that we have been carrying out for several years now, and that we hope many of you will take up and will consider submitting proposals for individual and/or collective works. 

It is a unique Law Book Series that bridges different fields of expertise to allow a percolation of experience and a sharing of this advanced knowledge from our individual, collective and/or institutional fields of competence. Our editorial board also reflects this idea with well-established researchers from all over the world and in all our disciplines with some of them who are pioneers in Visual Jurisprudence and Visual Semiotics. 

We will thus have the possibility of publishing monographs of almost 350 pages as well as edited volumes of nearly 900 pages. The official language of publication of this book series remains English, with the possibility of publishing some chapters in French for collective works. 

In the spirit of the rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari, the visual chaos of the Banyan tree (our official cover for our book series) reminds us of the variety of a root system revealing facets of (de)territorialization. With aerial roots that mature into multiple trunks of the tree, the Banyan has abundant root-trunks perpetually growing during its lifetime.  It has keenly adapted to environmental conditions insofar as roots, sprouting without the cover of soil, are visibly tumultous and unruly. Tentacular in appearance, the Banyan is rich in complex materiality and function. Yet, in seeing the Banyan, we can see beyond the tree to metaphorically envision the evolving development of the relationship of law and visual jurisprudence as a relationship equally disorganized and spontaneous. 

Our scopes: 

The Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work within and across the boundaries of law, jurisprudence, and the visual in various contexts and manifestations. It seeks to bring together a range of diverse and at the same time cumulative research traditions related to these fields to identify fertile avenues for interdisciplinary research.

In our everyday lives, we experience law as a system of signs. Representations of legality are visually manifested in the materiality of things we see and spatially experience. Methodologically, aesthetic texts of legality semiotically emerge as examples of visual jurisprudence and illustrate the constitutive waltz between social governance, formal law, and materiality.

In its tangled relationship to regulation, the visual complexity of law is semiotically articulated as an ongoing process of meaning imbued with symbolism, memory, and cultural markers. Through a legal semiotics framework of symbolic articulation and analysis, the examination of law that happens in conjunction with the visual expands understandings of how law is crafted and takes root. Additionally, such an inquiry challenges the positivist view of law based within the courtroom as disciplinary spatial practices, the observation of everyday phenomenon, and the visible tethering of regulation to cultural understandings of legality generate a framework of visual jurisprudence. The Series seeks to enliven such frameworks as those in which law happens precisely without formal institutions of law and through which a visual-based methodology of law is crafted through everyday instances of ordinariness that contextualize the relationship between law, culture, and banality. 

The Series welcomes proposals – be they edited collections or single-authored monographs – emphasizing the contingency and fluidity of legal concepts, stressing the existence of overlapping, competing and coexisting legal discourses, proposing critical approaches to law and the visual, identifying and discussing issues, proposing solutions to problems, offering analyses in areas such as legal semiotics, jurisprudence, and visual approaches to law.

Keywords: Legal Visual Studies, Popular Culture, Everyday Law, Spatiality, Legal Semiotics, Legal Geography, Legal Materiality, Legal Transplant, Bioethics, Cyber Law, Communication, Heritage and Territory, Design, Marketing, Packaging, Digitalization, Arts.

Our official website: 

Law and Visual Jurisprudence

Queries and/or submissions:

Should you be interested in submitting a proposal for Law and Visual Jurisprudence book series, either for an edited collection or a single-authored monograph, please liaise directly with both Series Editors using their emails: Sarah Marusek (marusek[at]hawaii.edu) and Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr[at]yahoo.com).

With best wishes

Anne Wagner & Sarah Marusek

Jewel and Campbell, Death in the Shadows @ljewel

Lucy A. Jewel , University of Tennessee College of Law, and Mary Campbell are publishing Death in the Shadows in Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal (2019). Here is the abstract.

This paper is about the law and visual culture. Its centerpiece is Parson Weems’ Fable (1939), a painting by the American artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) that depicts the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree. At first glance, Wood’s image appears to celebrate an enduring myth of American virtue, namely Washington’s precocious inability to tell a lie. Studying the picture more closely, however, one finds a pair of black figures, presumably two of the Washingtons’ slaves. Stationed beneath dark storm clouds and harvesting cherries from a second tree, these slaves invoke yet another national myth, that of the domestic serenity that supposedly reigned on Virginia’s colonial plantations. In the process, they quietly invoke the country’s grievous history of racial oppression, coercion, and brutality.

This isn’t the only place where Woods’ painting speaks of racial violence. To the contrary, Parson Weems’ Fable also raises the specter of lynching. Examining the shadows directly beneath the Washingtons and their fabled tree, one discovers a hanging black body. Intentional or not, this dangling corpse conjures the spectacular acts of theatrical violence that mobs of Euro-Americans inflicted on African Americans during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. By the 1930s, heated protests emerged against lynching—in popular songs, magazines, and art exhibitions, as well as more traditional political arenas. Unlike the painters most closely associated with him, Wood didn’t participate directly in such moments of artistic protest. Nonetheless, he would have been exposed to them as he painted Parson Weems’ Fable in the winter of 1939.

Regardless of Wood’s intentions, the work he created persistently connects the country’s origin myths to the murderous violence the U.S. has repeatedly inflicted on persons of color. Moreover, as the painting itself seems to realize, the law and culture forged by colonial Virginia planters like George Washington eventually morphed into a collective white psychopathy that found vicious expression in the practice of spectacle lynching. This colonial legal regime was deeply visual—a fact that accounts for not only its power, but also for the fundamental influence it continues to exert on current American conceptions of race.

A deep reading of Parson Weems’ Fable in the context of both its time (1939) and its setting (1736) reveals the extent to which the law is visual and the visual is legal. Indeed, the painting gives us a valuable lens for perceiving the pervasive connections that run between the two. Our thesis is that the profoundly visuo-legal nature of the country’s racial foundations helps explain the lack of progress the nation has made in dismantling the color line. As a result, the impulse to join the seemingly unrelated disciplines of legal study and art history isn’t an academic gimmick, but rather a necessity. For centuries, images have worked in tandem with statutes, judicial decisions, and various forms of legal (and illegal) punishment to indelibly imprint a logic of racial violence in our collective mindset. In order to fully excavate this logic, we need scholars who can analyze pictures as well as the law.

In terms of structure, we begin by introducing the painting and our analytical framework and method. After that, we explain the theoretical foundations for studying law and culture in this context. Finally, we connect colonial Virginia’s legal and cultural landscape to the traumatic racial violence that continues to haunt our national mythology.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Now Available: The Art of Law (2018) @SpringerLaw

Now available:

The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law and Justice in Context, from the Middle Ages to the First World War: (S. Huygebaert, G. Martyn, V. Paumen, E. Bousmar, and X. Rousseaux, eds., Springer Publishing, 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The contributions to this volume were written by historians, legal historians and art historians, each using his or her own methods and sources, but all concentrating on topics from the broad subject of historical legal iconography. How have the concepts of law and justice been represented in (public) art from the Late Middle Ages onwards? Justices and rulers had their courtrooms, but also churches, decorated with inspiring images. At first, the religious influence was enormous, but starting with the Early Modern Era, new symbols and allegories began appearing. Throughout history, art has been used to legitimise the act of judging, but artists have also satirised the law and the lawyers; architects and artisans have engaged in juridical and judicial projects and, in some criminal cases, convicts have even been sentenced to produce works of art. The book illustrates and contextualises the various interactions between law and justice on the one hand, and their artistic representations in paintings, statues, drawings, tapestries, prints and books on the other.

Murray on Mise en Scene and the Decisive Moment of Visual Legal Rhetoric

Michael D. Murray, University of Kentucky College of Law, is publishing Mise en Scène and the Decisive Moment of Visual Legal Rhetoric in volume 68 of the Kansas Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This article explores the attorney author’s understanding and implementation of principles that define how visual rhetorical works fulfill the task of effective visual communication and advocacy. These principles — referred to as mise en scène — will guide the attorney author in the identification or creation of works that will exhibit the “decisive moment” of effective visual rhetoric in legal contexts. In equal measure, knowledge and understanding of these principles will enable litigators to design and use effective visuals, and to challenge or respond to the visual rhetorical works proffered by their opponents. The article displays and analyzes a series of works of visual rhetoric and critiques the power and potential effectiveness of the image for the communication of the message or argument of the author. The goal of an attorney’s effort should be to choose or create images that show the decisive moment of the client’s narrative or the point of argument that the image is to communicate. This article will guide attorney authors in setting the stage for effective visual legal rhetoric. Introduction I. The Context: Visual Legal Rhetoric and Narrativity A. Speed and Power of Visual Works B. The audience’s role in visual communication C. Narrative and Applied Legal Storytelling II. Mise en Scène Principles A. The Dominant B. Lighting C. Color vs. Black and White D. Point of View and Perspective E. Composition and Framing, including the arrangement of subjects, the Gestalt theory, and the figure-ground relationship 1. The Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratios 2. The Rule of Odds 3. Filling the Frame without Overcrowding 4. Gestalt Theory and the Figure-Ground Relationship F. Staged vs. Unstaged Photographs and Video G. Altered and Manipulated Images 1. Editing and Cropping 2. Modification, concealing, or erasing of content III. Confronting Visual Legal Rhetoric IV. Conclusion

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

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. 

Amy Werbel's New Book on Anthony Comstock and Censorship in the Gilded and Progressive Periods; "Lust on Trial" @awerbel @LustonTrial @ColumbiaUP

Amy Werbel, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, is publishing Lust on Trial:Censorship and the Rise of American Obsenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (Columbia University Press).  Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Lust on Trial offers a new and unadulterated view of the risqué behaviors and complex sexualities of Americans in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras, and a fresh perspective on legal efforts to expand civil liberties before World War I. Extensive new research conducted in dozens of public and private archives makes it possible for the first time to fully tell the story of Anthony Comstock’s censorship of American visual culture, and to publish examples of the “obscenities” he suppressed. Lust on Trial illuminates the complex relationship between censorship and cultural change, and offers thought-provoking insight to our nation’s long struggle to live up to the promise of the First Amendment.

Call for Papers: Graphic Justice: Law, Comics, and Related Visual Media, SLSA Annual Conference, March 27-29, 2018, University of Bristol Law School @thomgiddens

Via @thomgiddens:

Graphic Justice: Law, Comics, and Related Visual Media

This stream invites submissions exploring the intersections of law and justice with comics, graphic fiction, and related visual media. Critical interest in the comics medium has exploded in recent decades, and is steadily growing within the legal academy. Indeed, comics and graphic fiction—and their related visual emanations, including film, video games, and wider ‘geek culture’—are of huge and on-going significance to law, justice, and legal studies.

On a socio-cultural level, comics are historically embroiled in debates of free speech whilst today they inspire countless pop culture adaptations—from television to cinema to video games, as well as performance activities such as cosplay—and can be seen to reflect and shape popular visions of justice, morality, politics, and law. On the level of content, from mainstream superhero narratives tackling overt issues of justice, governance and authority, to countless themes related to morality, justice, and humanity in stories within and far beyond the mainstream, comics are rich with legal material. On the level of form, the comics medium’s unique and restless blending of different media and types of representation (text, image, visuality, aesthetics, inter alia) radically opens up discourse beyond the confines of the word, enabling greater critical engagement amidst our increasingly visual age. On the level of production, comics are a complex art-form, with multiple creators working in individual, group, commercial, and industrial contexts, raising questions of ownership and exploitation—issues exacerbated by comics’ transmedia proliferation.

In short, comics and their related visual media bring rich cultural, practical, and aesthetic contexts and mediations to long-standing and emerging legal problems and settings. Broad questions framing this ‘graphic justice’ intersection might include: ​ What are the relationships between comics and related visual media, and law—culturally, socially, formally, theoretically, jurisprudentially...? How can we use comics and related visual media in law—in practice, education, theory, research...? Can we consider comics as objects of legal regulation in their own right—raising issues of definition, ownership, consumption, value...?

The crossover between law, comics, and related media is an expansive and open one. The examples above are merely indicative of possible issues and questions; the graphic justice stream welcomes submissions for papers that traverse any potential intersection between law and comics or related visual media—all broadly defined. ​

Conveners Thomas Giddens (thomas.giddens@stmarys.ac.uk); Angus Nurse (a.nurse@mdx.ac.uk); and David Yuratich (David.Yuratich@rhul.ac.uk)

Khorakiwala on Legal Consciousness as Viewed Through the Judicial Iconography of the Madras High Court

Rahela Khorakiwala, Jawaharlal Nehru University, has published Legal Consciousness as Viewed through the Judicial Iconography of the Madras High Court at 5 Asian Journal of Law and Society 1 (2018).

The Madras High Court located in Chennai, India, was established in 1862 when India was under colonial rule. It continues to exist in post-independence India after merging into the Indian legal system. In this study, I argue that the architecture and judicial iconography of the Madras High Court building reflects a recurring historical tension between Indian and British concepts of justice. This is continually reflected in the semiotics of the legal space of this high court which in turn influences the legal consciousness of the court personnel who utilize this space. This architecture and iconography of the Madras High Court constitutes, preserves, and reinforces the ambivalent legal consciousness of those who created, occupy, and visit this space. The contemporary legal consciousness of the court personnel is thus seen to have deep historical roots.

Via Legal History Blog.

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.

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).

Marrani on Space, Time, Law: From Archaic Rituals to Contemporary Perspectives @Doubledegree @routledgepublishing @InstofLawJersey

David Marrani, Director, Institute of Law, Jersey, has published Space, Time, Law: From Archaic Rituals to Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book merges philosophical, psychoanalytical and legal perspectives to explore how spaces of justice are changing and the effect this has on the development of the　administration of justice. There are as central themes: the idea of transgression as the starting point　of the question of justice and its archaic anchor; the relation between spaces of justice and ritual(s); the question of use and abuse of transparency in contemporary courts; and the abolition of the judicial walls with the use of cameras in courts. It offers a comparative approach, looking at spaces of justice in both the civil and common law traditions. Presenting a theoretical and interdisciplinary study of spaces of justice, it will appeal to academics in the fields of law, criminology, sociology and architecture.

 

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.

Murray on The Sharpest Tool In the Toolbox: Visual Legal Rhetoric and Narrativity

Michael D. Murray, University of Massachusetts School of Law, has published The Sharpest Tool in the Toolbox: Visual Legal Rhetoric and Narrativity. Here is the abstract.

The visual brief will become the norm in legal practice, because of the communicative and rhetorical power of visual media. Visual devices work rapidly, almost immediately, to communicate ideas and attain the audience’s adherence to the meaning and truth of the ideas communicated and thus to persuade the audience of the truth and propriety of the speaker’s communication, which allows greater perception, comprehension, and retention of information. Visual imagery is not only faster than words, it is better than words. Law students and lawyers should be aware that the tool of visual rhetoric is very sharp, and because of the audience’s role in interpreting and understanding the message of visual works, the sharpness cuts in multiple directions. These attributes require special attention so as to avoid intentional or inadvertent misleading of the audience when using visual rhetorical devices. This Article draws lessons from the power, complexity, and potential dangers of visual rhetoric regarding: (A) the analysis of when to use or not use a visual; (B) the decision to manipulate or not to manipulate images or video; (C) the decision to use color or not to use color; (D) the advisability of focus groups, or a wider and more diverse test audience; and (E) the goal to capture the "decisive moment" in a visual.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.