Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History

Abstract

This special issue of Critical Analysis of Law brings together a rich array of articles at the intersections of arts and legal history. In this introduction we reflect on some of the benefits and implications of this interdisciplinary juncture, which contemporary legal historians have been slow to engage. We highlight the significance of engaging with the arts for theoretical conundrums central to legal history: art as source, the philosophy of time, methodological scripts, and the relation of the descriptive to the normative. The arts, we argue, prove vital in tackling and breaching the limits of imagination imposed by our time and place — disciplinary place included.