We live in a digital Media Society, in which pictures are becoming more and more important. So, human communication is increasingly becoming a visual communication. That is not a new finding. But the new question is: What does this development mean for the law? Up to now the law is the part of the society which is most sceptical towards images. Law has still resisted the visual temptation. This will not last for ever. The rush of pictures in everyday life and in every part of the society is much too strong - and it is even getting stronger. The invasion of images will change the character of modern law deeply. Modern law will become a Pictorial Law.What are the chances and the risks of Pictorial Law and visual law communication? This is the topic of the book.
Collecting Yale Law Library's picture books / Michael Widener -- Reflections on an exhibition / Mark S. Weiner -- Ars Memoria in early law : looking beneath the picture / Jolande Goldberg -- Law's picture books and the history of book illustration / Erin C. Blake -- Law's picture books: The Yale Law Library collection. Symbolizing the law -- Depicting the law -- Diagramming the law -- Calculating the law -- Staging the law -- Inflicting the law -- Arguing the law -- Teaching the law -- Laughing-and crying-at the law -- Beautifying the law
Easy Company withstood the German Advance at the Battle of the Bulge and dashed Hitler's last hope for stopping the Allies' advance. They were able to do it because their leaders embaraced the Law of the Picture.
Both legal scholars and computer scientists will be curious to know how the gap between law and computing can be bridged. The law, and also jurisprudence, is based on language, and is mainly textual. Every syntactic system has its semantic range, and so does language, which in law achieves a high degree of professional precision. The use of visualisations is a syntactic supplement and opens up a new understanding of legal forms. This understanding was reinforced by the paradigm shift from textual law to legal informatics, in which visual formal notations are decisive. The authors have been dealing with visualisation approaches for a long time and summarise them here for discussion. In this book, a multiphase transformation from the legal domain to computer code is explored. The authors consider law enforcement by computer. The target view is that legal machines are legal actors that are capable of triggering institutional facts. In the visualisation of statutory law, an approach called Structural Legal Visualisation is presented. Specifically, the visualisation of legal meaning is linked with tertium comparationis, the third part of the comparison. In a legal documentation system, representing one legal source with multiple documents is viewed as a granularity problem. The authors propose to supplement legislative documents ex ante with explicit logic-oriented information in the form of a mini thesaurus. In contrast to so-called strong relations such as synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy/hyponymy, one should consider weak relations: (1) dialectical relations, a term of dialectical antithesis; (2) context relations; and (3) metaphorical relations, which means the use of metaphors for terms. The chapters trace topics such as the distinction between knowledge visualisation and knowledge representation, the visualisation of Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, the separation of law and legal science, legal subsumption, legal relations, legal machines, encapsulation, compliance, transparency, standard cases and hard cases.
Critical theory, characteristically linked with the politics of theoretical engagement, covers the manifold of the connections between theory and praxis. This thought-provoking Research Handbook captures the broad range of those connections as far as legal thought is concerned and retains an emphasis both on the politics of theory, and on the notion of theoretical engagement. The first part examines the question of definition and tracks the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories. The second part looks at the thematic connections between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought such as; Feminism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, varieties of post-modernism, as well as the various ‘turns’ (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. The third and final part explores particular fields of law, addressing the question how the field has been shaped by critical legal theory, or what critical approaches reveal about the field, with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation.
At the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemporary idea of law emerged out of specific ideas of reading in the nineteenth century. Reading shapes our identities. How we read shapes who we are. Reading also shapes our conceptions of what the law is, because the law is also a practice of reading. Focusing on the works of key Victorian writers closely associated with legal practice, this book addresses the way in which the identity of the reader of law has been modelled on the identity of the political elite. At the same time, it shows how other readers of law have been marginalised. The book thus shows how a construction of the law has emerged from the ordering of a power that discriminates between different readers and readings. More specifically, and in response to the emerging media of photography – and, with it, potentially subversive ideas of exposure and visibility – the book shows that there have been dominant, hidden and unrecognised guides to legal reading and to legal thought. And in making these visible, the book also aims to make them contestable. This secret history of law will appeal to legal historians, legal theorists, those working at the intersection of law and literature and others with interests in law and the visual.
Divided into three parts, this book examines the relationship between law and culture from various perspectives, both theoretical and empirical. Part I outlines the framework for further considerations and includes new, innovative conceptualizations of two ideas that are essential to the topic of law and culture: legal culture and customary law. Both of these reappear later in the more empirically oriented chapters of Parts II and III. Part II includes chapters on the relationships between law, customs, and culture, drawing heavily on the tradition and achievements of the anthropology of law and touching on important problems of multiculturalism, legal pluralism, and cultural defense. It focuses on the more intangible meaning of culture, while Part III addresses its more material, tangible aspects and the issue of cultural production, as well as its intersection with law.
In Painting Constitutional Law, scholars of constitutional law analyse Xavier Cortada’s series May It Please the Court. Exploring new connections between contemporary art and law, they discuss how Cortada captures these foundational decisions, their people, and their events on canvas.
This book includes revised selected papers from five International Workshops on Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL VI to AICOL X, held during 2015-2017: AICOL VI in Braga, Portugal, in December 2015 as part of JURIX 2015; AICOL VII at EKAW 2016 in Bologna, Italy, in November 2016; AICOL VIII in Sophia Antipolis, France, in December 2016; AICOL IX at ICAIL 2017 in London, UK, in June 2017; and AICOL X as part of JURIX 2017 in Luxembourg, in December 2017. The 37 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected form 69 submissions. They represent a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in legal informatics. The papers are organized in six main sections: legal philosophy, conceptual analysis, and epistemic approaches; rules and norms analysis and representation;legal vocabularies and natural language processing; legal ontologies and semantic annotation; legal argumentation; and courts, adjudication and dispute resolution.
This book examines the importance of flat ontologies for law and sociolegal theory. Associated with the emergence of new materialism in the humanities and social sciences, the elaboration of flat ontologies challenges the binarism that has maintained the separation of culture from nature, and the human from the nonhuman. Although most work in legal theory and sociolegal studies continues to adopt a non-flat, anthropocentric and immaterial take on law, the critique of this perspective is becoming more and more influential. Engaging the increasing legal interest in flat ontologies, this book offers an account of the main theoretical perspectives, and their importance for law. Covering the work of the five major theorists in the area – Gabriel Tarde, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad and Graham Harman – the book aims to encourage this interest, as well as to explicate the important problems of and differences between these perspectives. Flat ontologies, the book demonstrates, can offer a valuable new perspective for understanding and thinking about law. This book will appeal mainly to scholars and students in legal theory and sociolegal studies; as well as others with interests in the posthumanist turn in philosophy and social theory.
