Reframing the Visual Dynamics of Law

The workshop is going to explore the visual dynamics of law and its methodological consequences for both the disciplines of art history and legal studies. The aesthetic dimensions of the law and reflections about different ways of producing truth have been emphasized in the last years through different studies that were based for instance on Charles S. Peirce's semiotics and the sign-related dimensions of legal practices, Ernst Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms and its relevance for the notion of law, or Bruno Latour's ethnographical approach to institutional laboratories of the Conseil d'État, their ways of producing facticity and the idea of agency in general. The workshop seeks to critically interrogate the field of legal action manifested in juridical culture, artefacts and aesthetic practices and will discuss in how far they actively shape the juridical as part of a larger network of human actions and operations within the field of law.