Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History

This essay studies in detail, for the first time and in the context of legal as well as art history, Sir Joshua Reynolds's representation of Justice (1779). We argue that the image is of particular significance in the history of representations of justice, and marks the emergence of neoclassical ideals. These ideals became, for example in the work of Sir William Blackstone, central to the development of Anglo-American concepts of the common law. We argue that Reynolds's work exemplifies a profound shift and a rich complexity in these concepts. Our study also reveals the ways in which the artist's aesthetic practice and precedents gave him unique insights into the form and ideas of Justice. More than this, we suggest that the relationship between legal ideas and portraiture is suggestive for how the relationship between abstract norms and individual cases ought to be mediatedboth in the formative period of the late eighteenth century, and now. The connection between law and art helps not only to clarify but to develop and more richly comprehend both the history and the implications of legal concepts. Not in philosophy or jurisprudence or political theory is justice's struggle between particular and general most productively encountered, but in the dual cases of portraiture and common law. , Vox: +1 613 8844573.

Metaphilosophy, 1994

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2022

The relation of law and art is conventionally understood through a disciplinary divide that presents art as an instrument of legal practice and scholarship or, alternatively, presents law as potential context for artistic engagement. Moving beyond disciplinary definitions, in this article we explore how art and law, as modes of ordering and action in the world, often overlap in their respective desires to engage existing material orders. Whereas law's claim of producing order appears self-evident, we try to highlight, through a concept of legislative arts, the often-overlooked similar function of artistic practices. At the heart of what we refer to as legislative arts are practices that aim to challenge law's claim of authority in ordering social life through tactical combinations of elements of art and law. In examining a set of examples that include the Tamms Year Ten campaign to close a super-max prison in the United States, the work of Forensic Architecture and practices of passport forgery, we aim to highlight the possibility of manifesting social orders beyond an exclusive reliance upon state laws. Pointing to the potentials of such legislative arts practices, this article suggests that the material ordering quality of artistic and legal practices can, and perhaps should, be weaponized for challenging and remaking the world of unjust state laws.

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

Pólemos, 2022

A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In this article, I argue that a key strand of this 'legal turn' should be historicised in two entwined ways. It can be seen as an extension and reformalisation of some central concerns of late twentieth-century contemporary art; namely relational and participatory aesthetics, and the dematerialisation of the art object. But the artworks considered here can also be analysed as a fragmentary site of 'juristic subjectivity' in the aftermath of legal positivism. According to Carl Schmitt, the positivisation that took hold in the nineteenth century exiled the jurist from their role in formally elaborating the substantive law created by social praxis-turning the jurist into a "mere scholar" in relation to law. In this sense, the separation of juristic thought from law is the aftermath of this destructive event. Yet the etymology of aftermath also links it to a secondary growth that re-emerges after a mowing or harvest. Similarly, the 'contract artists' analysed here evidence a 'regrowth' of juristic thought that relies precisely on its position outside of law 'properly so-called', and inside the conditions of contemporary artistic production and consumption. Analysing contract artworks by artists Adrian Piper and A Constructed World, this article suggests that they differ markedly from the contract art, usually connected to the Siegelaub-Projansky agreement, that has received the majority of academic attention. Whereas that so-called "legal moment in artistic production" prioritises the author function, the abstraction of value, and the commodification of social relations, through the above double historicization I will argue that this 'other' contract art repurposes legal forms to institute a lived experience of juristic social relations, presenting a new kind of material jurisprudence.

Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities, 2021

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2010

In this late modern era within which the basic values of life have been reordered (driven by globalisation, the corporate agenda and mass communication technologies), the individual has effectively been reduced to a mere abstraction. It might be argued that the rational, moral and humanistic concept of freedom has, to a great extent, been compromised by a consequent crisis within the intelligentsia. These groups, in particular the gatekeepers of a classical liberal approach to legal scholarship, are caught between the twin evils of increased unreflective populism and pragmatism evident within many law schools and modern legal institutions. Although a contested term, defenders of the 'socio-legal' tradition, who place the humanities at the heart of legal research and education, are obliged to restate with increased determination the utility of the liberal arts and literature to the law profession and wider legal community. In a normative environment, law and narrative are inextricably linked and narrative poetry is not only invaluable to explaining the origins and location of the legal tradition, but also elicits a mode of understanding which transcends the boundaries of narrowlydefined legal hermeneutics-which often only addresses issues of an operational nature. French novelist Flaubert claimed ''chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d'un poète'' (Flaubert in Madame bovary (trans: Wall, G.), Penguin Classics, London, 1960: 269), paraphrased by American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, as ''inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet'' (Lukas in Big trouble: a murder in a small western town sets off a struggle for the soul of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997: 323). In an age of disenchantment, this paper explores the poetic form as an important medium within which to understand the nature and function of law in a society of differentiated individuals.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

2011] AFTERWORD 1041 influence of "law and" in their resort to synchronic analyses of relational conjunction and disjunction, to which they add diachrony in order to reveal the effect of law, or to explain its reality, by assessing change in its relation to other phenomena over time. Unsurprisingly, the animating hypotheses of twentiethcentury legal history embrace the same broad relational problematics that have preoccupied twentieth century "law and" theory: instrumentalism, relative autonomy, mutual constitutiveness, legal construction, autopoiesis, and indeterminacy. 10 The shift to "law as. . ." suggests something else, something distinctive. Concretely, it suggests that explanations of law are not to be found, either necessarily or sufficiently, in its relations to other things. As Shai Lavi notes, with justification, the shift affords an opportunity to think beyond long-familiar Weberian categories and trajectories. 11 It is not determinedly programmatic, a route to the next big concept, but open-ended (hence the ellipsis). Yet it would be idle to pretend that "law as. . ." takes no position, that it is not historically situated. Blithely unaware of it at the outset, the conveners of the conference where the essays here were first presented have discovered that we are on a path that others are also following. We find ourselves riding a wave, one reverberating in both legal 12 and historical 13 scholarship. The wave owes its existence to developments in both history and law. As to the latter, it has never been more of a "hypostatized construct" than at present. 14 We return to this observation below. 15 But what of the former? It, too, hypostatizes itself, though in a more limited sense, being a professional practice with less instrumental reach. Still, as a professional practice, contemporary history, like law, is full of talk of itself. History's talk is of what history has to offer the present. 16 One offering is the narrative history that has become something of a staple of literary nonfiction. Narrative history represents history as edifying stories of the past. As Gordon 10.

The assessment of Literature is caught by the human spirit and it deploys in the legal world, which, like in the spiritual field, defragments the legal phenomenon in all its dimensions, specificities, dynamics and situation. That "spirituality" achieves what the elements of the legal world can not achieve on their own, with their natural functions. The Spirituality of Art and Literature nurtures and connects with History and the People's spirit, overcoming temporality, spatiality, people, situations, and enduring in time. It is installed in timelessness, in which it would have contact points with the spirituality of religion, and as in it, it produces the effects of a "spiritual causation" with the world of culture and Law, through diffuse human influences, which would contribute as an integrator, at the legal level, of the diversity of the various cultural sectors. All value is an ideal entity, that is to say, it is an entity that we catch through our spirit exclusively. As such, the ideal entity opposes the real entity, which we approach through our senses. The value is not the only ideal entity. Another ideal entity is the concept. (1) Evidently, the spiritual dimension, to which the quoted Master refers, can catch what our senses cannot be aware of or explain. We should know about a spiritual dimension but we find it difficult to recognize it. In Art, something similar happens and only Artists manage to catch that dimension and reflect it in their works of art. Even Art can show us what science cannot, a typical example is when we want to present a city, perhaps, it takes longer to present it through a work of Art than with a scientific analysis of Architecture or Engineering. From the trialist tridimensional integrativism, we deconstruct elements and dimensions, which we as members of the legal world understand and feel satisfactory about. The legal world has different horizons having deep meaning to the philosophy of Law. At the sociological dimension, Sociology, Economy and Psychology appear (specific of Law and general); at the normological dimension, Logic, Methodology, Linguistics and Literature (specific of Law and general) are found and at the axiologic dimension, the Axiology (as the Philosophy of justice, of the other values of the legal world and of values in general) is found.

2024

This volume deals with the figurative representation of law and power in the 19th Century, emphasising the importance of images and, thus, of the iconographic representation of themes and concepts pivotal to law in 19th-century Europe. The twenty collected contributions examine multiple topics connected to different forms of artistic expression and investigate how painting, sculpture, and architecture reproduced a peculiar vision of law and power, sometimes to amplify its importance, sometimes to formulate an open critique. The volume analyses a series of case studies to focus, with a comparative and multidisciplinary approach, on the ways in which the emergence of a new juridical experience in 19th-century Europe led to the replacement – or re-semanticisation – of symbols and images traditionally associated with law and power, in order to express and propose to the society of the time a new conception of the law.