Edinburgh Studies in Law, Justice and the Visual – serie

The typographic form of judgment stages the authoritative presence of the common law. It is in the encounter with typographic materials that legal meaning is generated, yet typographic legality—the material expression of law as visual text—is rarely examined. In this book, Thomas Giddens refocuses critical attention by studying the history of the common law’s visual technologies and unpacking the heritage, meanings and techniques of its typographic appearance. It thereby develops new methodological approaches for reading the common law’s primary materials as visual media.From the archive as a typographic theatre of jurisdiction, to early law report printing, to the mass duplication of reports and their entanglement in the project of empire, to the common law’s digital display, Typographic Legality encounters enduring questions of legal authority, media and technology in the material details of the common law’s textual form.

Dismembers and remembers the sensual and spiritual body of Lady Justice in a wholly novel interpretation of the optical allegory of IustitiaPresents an original theory of the blindfold on JusticeIncludes case studies of the allegorical significance of all of the attributes of JusticeDraws on early modern sources including forensic speeches, epigrams, eulogies, formal discourses and commentaries on cases to offer a new paradigm of judicial actioPresents new critical analyses of key Latin texts, subjecting them to critical philological scrutiny for the first timeCategorizes images of Lady Justice through a range of parameters: their plasticity, accessibility, their effect of presence, their material link to the space dispositive and their plastic salienceLady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory leaves conventional readings of this pivotal figure in European legal history far behind. Hayaert's study brings together an analysis of thousands of images from the period 1400 - 1600, many of them previously overlooked, including artwork, frontispieces, legal texts, sculptures and statues in public spaces and in court buildings scattered across six countries. Lady Justice is taken apart and considered afresh - organ by organ, limb by limb, digit by digit, making a case for a treatment of allegory in all its complexity, ambiguity and affective force.This unique interdisciplinary study exceeds the iconographic orthodoxy of art historians and the reductive interpretations of legal historians alike. Setting aside styles and schools, ranging widely across time and space, Hayaert identifies Lady Justice as the seat of law's conscience, an archetype of the judge's daimon, and an affective, numinous address to all who, over the course of seven centuries, have found themselves moved by her redolent and inextinguishable presence.