Prawo w filmie jako przejaw estetyki prawa i szczególny przypadek kierunku prawo i literatura

If we put together and systematize research streams: law in film, law and literature, and aesthetics of law, it is easy to reach the conclusion that we are dealing with related subjects, with a certain overlap in research areas. The broadest term is aesthetics of law, whose scope covers the entire law and literature movement, meanwhile law in film is a more detailed aspect of the latter. Systematizing the aesthetics of law, we can close it in three aspects: the external one, the internal one, and the one called ‘law as a device for aesthetization’. The aesthetics of law in the external aspect deals with manifestations of law, legal inspirations, legal themes, symbols, signs, which were represented through centuries in fine arts. The subject of the aesthetics of law in the internal aspect is the law itself. The third aspect of the aesthetics of law focuses on law as a device for aesthetization of daily life. In the law and literature movement, the reflections concern either the inclusion of legislative and legal content in literary works (law in literature), or the literary, including aesthetic, value, of normative instruments, and more broadly, also other acts of applying the law (law as literature). A special case of this research stream is legal cinematography, where a film prepared on the basis of a screenplay is treated as a kind of narrative, justifying the statement that law in film further develops the law and literature movement. The practical aspect of such research – of legal aesthetics, law and literature, and law in film – concerns mainly the significance and influence on legal awareness, and on shaping the attitudes towards law. The key thing here is approaching the problem of influencing legal awareness through other means than the text of a normative instrument alone.

Legal Aesthetics in The Touching Contract: Memory, Exposure and Transformation

This paper considers how an artwork might play a role in the political, legal and aesthetical ‘working-through’ of historical injustices. With specific reference to Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’ participatory performance project, The Touching Contract (2016), we consider how traumatic affects from Ireland’s past continue to shape the present. Drawing primarily on the work of Jacques Rancière and Bracha L. Ettinger, we argue that The Touching Contract has the capacity to transform participants’ relation to legal history in two ways. First, by juxtaposing unspoken histories of female bodily vulnerability in relation to law with legal form during an encounter with participatory performance, this art project generates ‘mystery’, producing a productive ‘interval’ (Rancière) between the common sense of legal history and its potential re-calibration. Second, in its production of a relational ‘affectosphere’ (Kinsella), The Touching Contract provokes participants’ capacity to engage with that interval, to be genuinely affected by the transmission of legal history and respond to it in new ways.

LEGAL AESTHETICS, OR THE ART OF THE LAW

The author focuses on the legal aesthetics dilemma, which appears in the dominant sense that the legal content prevails over the legal form. Some possible reasons and consequences of the aesthetical crisis are considered. The article offers the way to overcome that crisis. To this end the author outlines the new interdisciplinary field of legal studies called legal aesthetics. According to the author’s opinion the aesthetical criteria shall be applied primarily to the legal text and also to all the tools, such as visualisations, which make it more comprehensible. The key issues of the new discipline are scrutinized, such as objectives, subject, method and relations with other legal studies, such as legal technique. The author shows the connection between the legal aesthetics and legal design, arising within philosophy of design-thinking.

Forming the Legal Avant-Garde: A Theory of Art/Law

This piece seeks to account for an increased interest in the intersection of art and law within legal thinking, activism and artistic practice, arguing there to exist the phenomena and movement of ‘art/law’. Art/law is the coming together of theory and practice in legal and political aesthetics, understood as a practice, (im)materially performed. It is seen as a natural consequence of thinking law and resistance in terms of space and time, accounting for a turn towards the visual, the practical and the role of affect, within ways of knowing. Art/law is a symptom of the end of art and end of law, synchronically rendered. Divisions between legal and aesthetic form have been well rehearsed within legal aesthetics scholarship, from law and literature, to critical legal studies’ work with images, text and performativity, and now law’s Anthropocene. Art/law as a practice, however, is argued as an emergent onto-epistemic-ethics of necessity, a movement of seeing, being and knowing in response to the advancement of spectacle. It is the simultaneous reunion of law, art and resistance as one, breaking down the institutional artifice of art worlds and law worlds, offering a form of ‘resistant (in)formalism’, that accounts for matter and change and asserts convergence as a medium. It is an inclusion of the uncertain and the disordered, that is an opening for the audience. This resistant (in)formalism describes the role of form, audience and practice within property, legal and aesthetic establishment, offering a countering of separatism at the end of art and the end of law, through a praxeology of art/law in seeing, thinking and action.

Sociological Aesthetics of Law

Aesthetic theory has the potential to develop a sensorium for the rational and arational forces of law. But the aesthetic knowledge of law is underdeveloped. That is why this article proposes a self-reflective sociological aesthetics of law that is capable of acknowledging human and social forces. The article unfolds its argument in three steps: first, it outlines the main approaches in the field of “law and aesthetics”; second, it connects these approaches in legal aesthetics with sociological and philosophical discussions on aesthetics; and, third, it suggests what distinctive contributions such a connection could make to jurisprudence and legal practice.