What Authorizes the Image? The Visual Economy of Post-Secular Jurisprudence

Desmond Manderson, ed., Law and the Visual: Transitions and Transformations, University of Toronto Press (2017)

NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2876765

18 Pages Posted: 11 Mar 2017

Date Written: March 5, 2017

Abstract

In law’s visual economy our commitment to justice grows out of a renewed encounter with an interior libidinal source whose ongoing collective investment binds us to the nomos in which we live. We experience this corporeal bond in paintings, films, and video images on screens large and small. In the ethically inflected aesthetic of post-secular jurisprudence, justice is to law as beauty is to art. As distant as an abstract expressionist canvas, as close as any neighbor, or indeed any screen on which the neighbor becomes real to us. That is where we behold the source and instantiation of law’s judgment and authority.

Keywords: justice, art, visual economy, post-secular, iconology, law and humanities, synaesthesia, law and film, visual jurisprudence

JEL Classification: B50, Z10, Z11, K19, K39

Suggested Citation

Sherwin, Richard Kenneth, What Authorizes the Image? The Visual Economy of Post-Secular Jurisprudence (March 5, 2017). Desmond Manderson, ed., Law and the Visual: Transitions and Transformations, University of Toronto Press (2017) , NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2876765, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2876765

Richard Kenneth Sherwin (Contact Author)

New York Law School ( email )

185 West Broadway
New York, NY 10013
United States

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