The contributions to Law and Art address the interaction between law, justice, the ethical and the aesthetic. The exercise of the legal role and the scholarly understanding of legal texts were classically defined as ars iuris - an art of law - which drew on the panoply of humanist disciplines, from philology to fine art. That tradition has fallen by the wayside, particularly in the wake of modernism. But, as this book demonstrates, a consideration of the relationship between law and art can still bring jurisprudence, and particularly critical jurisprudence, to life. In its attention to the inexpressible, art can contribute to the liberation of legal doctrine from its own self-imposed limits. It can inform the ethics of a legal theory that is concerned to address how theoretical abstractions and concrete oppressions overlook the singularity and spontaneity to which art attests. The contributors to this volume - and their engagement with the full range of 'the arts' - seek, therefore, to disturb and to supplement conventional accounts of justice: raising the difficulty, but also the promise, of that surplus which art reveals: of life over legal formalisation.
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