Danse Macabre

Desmond Manderson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor in the Australian National University, Canberra College of Law and the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is the author of several books including Songs without Music (2000), Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (2012), and Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique (2017).

'This book dances indeed. Moving deftly from one angle of the triangle of time, law, and art, to the other, this book shows - through a great variety of artworks, all taken up in detail - the complexities and the consequences of these pluralities. There is no other book which does this in such depth in all three fields. We know that law does not equal justice, that the line between law and genocide is flint-thin, and that the time of the clock is very different from the temporalities we experience. That law's dance has death at its heart is a fact of life, but that so many artists in so many different cultural places and moments have been able to make this sensuously perceptible and deploy it as a cry for a justice that is, precisely, not blind: this is what Manderson demonstrates in this utterly enjoyable book.' Mieke Bal, Cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator

• Foreword; 1. Bruegel's 'Justice': anachronic time; 2. Reynolds's justice, Blackstone's laws: diachronic time; 3. Governor Arthur's proclamation: utopian time; 4. Turner's 'Slave Ship': now time; 5. Klimt's 'Jurisprudence': suspended time; 6. Bennett's laws: colonial time; 7. Cauduro's crimes: ectoplasmic time; Afterword.