Law & Humanities Blog

A Law and Humanities Conference at Australian National University

Posted: 21 Jan 2014 03:33 PM PST

An announcement of a law and humanities conference at Australian National University:

Law and the Visual—Transitions & Transformations
Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University: 7 - 8 July 2014
The Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University is one of the world's oldest and best-known research centres in interdisciplinary humanities. As part of its 2014 Annual Theme, Now Showing: Cultures, Judgements, and Research on the Digital Screen, we are calling for papers on themes of visual representations of law in history and the contemporary world, focusing in particular on moments of transition and transformation. Over the long journey of modernity, technologies of law and technologies of the visual have been marked by their volatility and inventiveness. On the one hand, changing technologies of law – the emergence of the text, the development of legislation, the might of sovereignty, structures of colonialism, mechanisms of human rights, new modes of regulation, governance, and discipline – have continually transformed our understanding of and relationship to legality. On the other hand, changing technologies of visual representation – the development of perspective, the triumph of printing, photography, film, and video games to name a few – have equally transformed our understanding of and relationship to images. In what ways can each shed light on the other?
v How have technologies of visual representation reflected, illuminated, and constituted ideologies of law and legality – particularly at moments of significant transition or transformation?
v In what way do visual representations of law throughout the pre-modern, modern and contemporary periods illuminate and challenge our understanding of the changing relationship between law, aesthetics, and power?
v In what ways do contemporary media allow new opportunities for a cross-cultural conversation around key legal issues and conflicts?
v How does the aesthetics and technology of the digital screen transform the representation of legal concepts such as the rule of law, sovereignty, justice, or human rights?
Only a limited number of papers can be accepted for this symposium. It provides a rare opportunity to join an outstanding cast of international scholars in legal history, legal theory, and legal aesthetics to discuss and present exciting new work on the intersection of law and the visual. Negotiations are currently underway with possible partners for the publication of selected papers.

Wilde's three trials in 1895 served, in effect, as an obscenity prosecution of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91). Though the novel was not formally charged with obscenity, Dorian Gray's first reviewers suggested that it was obscene, and the book remained unavailable in England for nearly two decades after Wilde's trials. The novel's relation to Wilde's trials thus raises a number of questions about the use of fiction as legal evidence and about the ways in which a criminal prosecution might be taken to reveal the meaning of the defendant's writings. This essay discusses the late Victorian campaign against obscene literature and the victims of that campaign; the reviews of the original version of Dorian Gray (in Lippincott's Magazine, 1890); the oblique manner in which the innuendo about its obscenity functioned during Wilde's three trials (1895); Wilde's own ironic engagement, at several key points in the novel, with the conception of influence at work in the legal test governing the evaluation of obscenity (R. v. Hicklin, 1868); the relation of the painting itself, and of the notorious French novel that Dorian borrows from Lord Henry, to that conception of influence; and Wilde's reenactment of his ironic perspective at the narrative level.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.