Intersections in Law, Culture and the Humanities*

Ever more often, researchers and scholars endeavor to situate law in its social, political, historical and cultural contexts. At the same time, there is a need to invest law and the social sciences with new roles and resources. We thus propose to look for the many intersections of law, culture and the humanities by presenting four topical preoccupations: (1) interlegality in everyday life; (2) the synesthesia of law; (3) material socio-legal studies; and (4) interactive ecologies of knowledges and methodologies. This will constitute part one of the paper. Parts two and three will look at two particular and very recent interdisciplinary relationships: those between law and music and between law and food. We thus propose it would be appropriate to expose students, learners and practitioners of all kinds to the difference that an understanding of the links between law, culture and the humanities makes.

Alternative Law Journal, 2016

Buffalo L. Rev.

International Journal of Law in Context, 2009

This paper was delivered as a plenary lecture, designed to respond to the one-day special conference focus upon links between socio-legal studies and the humanities.1 The paper focuses in particular upon the relationship between law and the humanities. It may be argued that the role of empirically sourced socio-legal research is well accepted, given its tangible utility in terms of producing hard data which can inform and transform policy perspectives. However, scholarly speculation about the relationship between law and the humanities ranges from the indulgent to the hostile. In particular, legal scholars aligning themselves as ‘black letter’ commentators express strong opinions about such links, suggesting that scholarship purporting to establish links between the two fields is essentially spurious, bearing in mind the purposive role of law as a problem-solving mechanism. The paper sets out to challenge such assertions, indicating the natural connections between the two fields and...

2011

This article discusses three major approaches connecting culture to law. The first is the historical school that arose in German jurisprudence in the first half of the nineteenth century. It views law as a product of a nation’s culture and as embedded in the daily practices of its people. The second approach is the constitutive approach that developed in American jurisprudence in the 1980s. This approach views law as participating in the constitution of culture and thereby in the constitution of people’s minds, practices, and social relations. The third approach, found in twentieth-century Anglo-American jurisprudence, views the law that the courts create and apply as a distinct cultural system. Law practitioners internalize this culture in the course of their studies and professional activity, and this internalization comes to constitute, direct, and delimit the way these practitioners think, argue, resolve cases, and provide justifications. The writings of Karl Llewellyn, James Bo...

Law, Culture and Humanities, 2019

This short Commentary imagines law and humanities not as a “canon” per se, but as a “field without a canon”; or a canon that resists canonization. Arts-based practices utilized in legal research and teaching expose the law and humanities “canon” to its dual (and somewhat contradictory) nature: ever straining towards a pre-established archive, it must also leap ahead fearlessly to properly defy disciplinary boundaries and move the field beyond siloed thinking, which is one of the preliminary aims of law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy. Arts-based practices consist not of a stable collection of set texts, but instead signify a process of experimentation that is ever in flux and alive to possibility. It is this process of discovering new arts-based practices that ensures law and humanities remains a vibrant, yet ever-changing, field for years to come. To that end, this Commentary surveys a sampling of outsider approaches to law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy, those more concerned with process than product, and which are coming from outside of or beyond the more traditionally conceived canon of law and humanities. These approaches fall into two broad categories: (1) arts-based scholarly legal practices; and (2) arts-based legal pedagogical practices. A uniting feature of both these approaches is that they are being undertaken and explored by Canadian legal scholars at a small law school on Vancouver Island on the West Coast of Canada, namely the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, where there is an impressive number of faculty members using arts-based practices in their research and teaching.

1998

Symbolic and material symbols of culture are omnipresent in our everyday lives, as exemplified by taking a walk through downtown Toronto. As both law and culture are in a constant state of flux and mutually reconstituting themselves and one another, I suggest that exploring law culturally provides a more focused and politicized emphasis upon meaning in those disciplinary spaces that are preoccupied with questions of power. Similarly, studying culture legally in fields like anthropology and cultural studies will enable disciplines with tendencies toward culturalism to have more specific and material theories of power, as it resonates in a multitude of ways. Widely considered as a field of cultural politics, intellectual property has provided an especially promising point of entry for exploring the prospects for an interdisciplinarity that encompasses perspectives drawn from anthropology, cultural studies, and law and society scholarship. If the life of the law is experience, then the pervasive textuality of experience in the late twentieth century needs to be understood legally. The local animation of the law should be addressed experientially, in terms of the way law manages meaning, shapes relations of cultural authority and contestation, provokes a politics of property, propriety, and appropriation, and provides forms and fora for articulations of identity and difference. Jolted by espresso, awakened by life on the street, and alert to the properties of contemporary cultural life, a critical cultural studies of law comes into view.

2019

The collection of thirty-five essays presented here examines the links forged through the ages between the realm of law and the expressions of the humanistic culture. The essays are organized into sections of ten chapters based around ten different themes. Two main perspectives emerged: in some articles the topic relates to the conventional approach of ‘law and/in humanities’ (iconography, literature, architecture, cinema, music), other articles are about more traditional connections between fields of knowledge (in particular, philosophy, political experiences, didactics). The variety of authorial nationalities gives the collection a multicultural character and the historiographical interpretation is the element that unites the collection, with a breadth of the chronological period goes from antiquity to the contemporary age. This project is the result of discussions that took place during the XXIII Forum of the Association of Young Legal Historians held in Naples in the spring of 2017

Much of the cultural sociological research in law and culture falls into one of the following approaches: (1) law as a structure that enables and constrains culture; (2) culture as a structure that enables and constrains law; and (3) law as a cultural toolkit or repertoire upon which actors draw to orient strategies for action. This article briefly reviews these approaches, then, drawing from the generative socio‐legal tradition in law as culture, highlights a fourth approach. While law and culture are often analyzed as autonomous forces in ongoing contention, negotiation, and reconciliation, the socio‐legal approach conceptualizes the relationality of law and culture as constituted by ongoing contention. I argue that this rela-tional approach may offer cultural sociologists who do not study law a framework for better analyzing how power undergirds, enables and constrains cultural meaning. I offer examples to illustrate the utility of this research agenda through three areas of interest for cultural sociologists: (1) embodiment; (2) emotions; and (3) political culture. Such an approach encourages a two‐way bridge between cultural sociology and socio‐legal studies conceptualizing culture as a dynamic system of power relations.

2019

What is at stake here? I want to present ‘cultural techniques of law’ as a research and pedagogical programme a ‘format’ which has developed between the disciplines of law, media studies and cultural studies; or more precisely, at the interstices of these respective disciplinary boundaries (Vismann 2012a). I do so in the form of an essay and try to make some further suggestions for the programme. The essay is written from a position that is not fully identical with ‘law’. The term ‘format’ is meant to reflect the existence of such a programme, without claiming that it has been realised successfully. Such an incomplete identification of law with the method of its study is not a co-incidence. The starting point to think about law ought to be law’s difference rather than identity. It is in this sense that cultural techniques of law are the techniques of differentiation, modification and transmission that reproduce law. Culture does not refer to a historically stabilised identity, but o...