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A New Collection on Legal Aesthetics

Posted: 11 Dec 2012 11:19 AM PST

Forthcoming from Walter de Gruyter:

Visualizing Law and Authority: Essays on Legal Aesthetics (Lief Dahlberg ed.; 2012) (Law and Literature; 4).

From the publisher's website:


The volume "Visualizing Law and Authority. Essays on Legal Aesthetics" brings together revised papers from the international conference "Law and the Image", held in Stockholm, 24–25 September, 2010. The participants/contributors belong to the disciplines of Art history, Cultural studies, Literary and Media studies, and Law. The contributions discuss the complex relations between law, media and visual phenomena. The common theme of the essays consists in an examination of the scopic field and of regimes of visibility in phenomenological terms, arguing that law constitutes a cognitive and aesthetic field of normative world-making. Rather than merely inverting Shelley's dictum that the "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", the essays argue in different ways for the necessity to develop a legal aesthetics.
The most immediate way of pursuing such a legal aesthetics consists in examining law itself as an aesthetic object, for instance the power of law to produce icons, in the sense of unreadable texts or textiles (Martin Kayman, Gary Watt). Several essays focus on the way that visual art and media can be used to constitute and represent political power, but also to question it and to put it into question (Chiara Battisti, Leif Dahlberg, Elina Druker, Sidia Fiorato, Paul Raffield). Other essays investigate legal structures inherent in the artwork (and the artworld) itself (Ari Hirvonen, Max Liljefors, Christine Poggi, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen). Finally, there are two essays focusing on the use of images and imagery in the legal process, explicity arguing for the need of a legal aesthetics (Daniela Carpi, Richard Sherwin).
Although diverse, the individual essays are interconnected with each other in fruitful and critical ways, making both explicit and implict references to each other.Available in print and as an e-book.



 

Confucius and Chinese Legal Philosophy

Posted: 11 Dec 2012 11:07 AM PST

Norman P. Ho, Netherlands China Law Centre; Morrison & Foerster (Hong Kong) is publishing Confucian Jurisprudence in Practice: Pre-Tang Dynasty Panwen (Written Legal Judgments) in the Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal. Here is the abstract.

Most scholarship on Chinese legal philosophy has neglected the study of Confucian jurisprudence in practice. As a result of this incomplete portrayal, scholars predominantly view the premodern Chinese Confucian legal tradition as lacking a rule of law system, which has led to blaming Confucianism for much of China's modern and historical rule of law problems. This article seeks to complicate this view by examining Confucian jurisprudence in practice: specifically, the development of pre-Tang dynasty panwen (written legal judgments). Through analysis of specific panwen from various Chinese primary sources — many of which have never been translated into English — this article will show that even in Chinese antiquity the legal system was not solely marked by codification or the lack of the rule of law, but was far more complex and diverse than most scholars have portrayed. For example, elements of case law played an important role in Chinese legal history. Indeed, it is an especially good time to build our understanding of the use of cases and the role of panwen, in China's legal past given the Supreme People's Court's recent emphasis on the role of case law in contemporary Chinese jurisprudence.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Robin West's "Normative Jurisprudence"

Posted: 11 Dec 2012 11:03 AM PST

Hanoch Dagan, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, is publishing Normative Jurisprudence and Legal Realism in volume 63 of the University of Toronto Law Journal (2013). Here is the abstract.

This review article examines Robin West's provocative new book Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction. West provides a learned and sophisticated account of the decay of the three major jurisprudential traditions of North American legal theory: natural law, legal positivism, and critical legal studies, which leads to and is motivated by a spirited plea for the reinvigoration of distinctively legal normative scholarship. Her proposed genealogy is valuable and her preliminary blueprint for reform important. But I believe that both fronts can be significantly enriched by a more charitable reading of legal realism than the one she (briefly) provides. Thus, this review offers a competing genealogical account of the three contemporary approaches to law West criticizes, claiming that like critical scholars, promoters of institutional fit and of economic efficiency are also intellectual descendants of legal realism. Legal realism, I insist, provides a subtle conception of law as a set of institutions distinguished by the irreducible cohabitation of power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress. This conception, which was torn apart by the realists' heirs, offers the key to a proper cure to the predicament West identifies by pointing out to a robust understanding of legal theory and thus of the distinctive contribution legal scholars can make in normative debates.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 
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