Peter Goodrich

Genealogies of Legal Vision - Discourses of Law Peter Goodrich 1st edition

Brief Description: "This collection focuses on the history of legal emblems and the genealogy of law's visual structures. The growing interest in law and the visual has tended to focus in a somewhat lazy fashion upon film and law, rather than addressing the actual history of law's regimes of visual control. But early modern lawyers, civilian and common alike, developed their very own ars iuris or art of law. A variety of legal disciplines always relied in part upon the use of visual representations, upon images and statuary to convey authority and sovereign norm. Military, religious, administrative and legal images found juridical codification and expression in collections of signs of office, in heraldic codes, in genealogical devices, and then finally in the juridical invention in the mid-sixteenth century of the legal emblem book. This book traces the complex lineage of the legal emblem and argues that the mens emblematica of the humanist lawyers was the inauguration of a visiocratic regime that continues in significant part into the present and multiple technologies of vision. Bringing together leading experts on the history of legal emblems to address the critical question of why it was lawyers who authored the emblemata, and correlatively, what was the relation and role of these visual depictions of norms to the practice and performance of law, this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity"--Biographical Note: Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School and Director of the Program in Law and Humanities and is author of Legal Emblems and the Art of Law (2013). Valerie Hayaert is a researcher at the Fondation Bodmer, Cologny, Geneva and author of Mens emblematica et humanisme juridique (2008)."Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; This collection focuses on the history of legal emblems and the genealogy of law's visual structures. The growing interest in law and the visual has tended to focus in a somewhat lazy fashion upon film and law, rather than addressing the actual history of law's regimes of visual control. But early modern lawyers, civilian and common alike, developed their very own ars iuris or art of law. A variety of legal disciplines always relied in part upon the use of visual representations, upon images and statuary to convey authority and sovereign norm. Military, religious, administrative and legal images found juridical codification and expression in collections of signs of office, in heraldic codes, in genealogical devices, and then finally in the juridical invention in the mid-sixteenth century of the legal emblem book. This book traces the complex lineage of the legal emblem and argues that the mens emblematica of the humanist lawyers was the inauguration of a visiocratic regime that continues in significant part into the present and multiple technologies of vision. Bringing together leading experts on the history of legal emblems to address the critical question of why it was lawyers who authored the emblemata, and correlatively, what was the relation and role of these visual depictions of norms to the practice and performance of law, this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity--; Provided by publisher. Publisher Marketing: It was the classical task of legal rhetoric to make law both seen and understood. These conjoint goals came to be separated and opposed in modernity and a degree of blindness ensued. Legal reason was increasingly deemed to be a purely textual enterprise. Against this constraint and in furtherance of an incipient visual turn in legal studies, Genealogies of Legal Vision seeks to revive the classical ars iuris and to this end traces the history of regimes of visual control. Law always relied in significant measure upon the use of visual representations, upon pictures, architecture, costume and statuary to convey authority and sovereign norm. Military, religious, administrative and legal insignia found juridical codification and expression in collections of signs of office, in heraldic codes, in genealogical devices, and then finally in the juridical invention in the mid-sixteenth century of the legal emblem book. Genealogies of Legal Vision traces the complex lineage of the legal emblem and argues that the mens emblematica of the humanist lawyers was the inauguration of a visiocratic regime that continues into the multiple new technologies and novel media of contemporary governance. Bringing together leading experts on the history and art of legal emblems this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity.

Contributor Bio:  Goodrich, Peter Peter Goodrich is a Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law, New York. His previous books include Reading the Law (1986), Legal Discourse (1992), Oedipus Lex (1996) and, more recently, Laws of Love (2006) and, with Christian Delage, The Scene of the Mass Crime: History, Film and International Tribunals (2012). He is also co-author and co-producer of the award-winning feature documentary Auf Wiedersehen: Til We Meet Again (Diskin Films, 2011).