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. 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, this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity.