Legal stagings. The visualization, medialization and ritualization of law in language, literature, media, art and architecture

In tandem with contemporary modern society becoming increasingly dependent upon visuality, new trends have emerged in cultural studies discussing how visual representations influence our perception of society and its institutions. This is an important observation concerning central elements of law and legal thinking, which to a large extent have been shaped and informed by a text-based tradition: legislation, preparatory materials, court decisions, and commentaries almost without exception manifest themselves in the form of texts.

Most of the papers in this volume, written by lawyers and scholars working in various fields, address variegated forms of legal staging and visual representation across a range of different disciplines and genres, including architecture, theatre, courtroom art and portraiture, cinema, literature, journalism. Benefiting from contextual and legal-cultural comparative methods, the contributions combine theoretical approaches to the visuality of law with practical experiences, demonstrating how law is so much more than law in action and law in books; law is also part of a visual culture: it contributes to that culture and is, in turn, analyzed, maintained and criticized by that culture.

While the majority of the papers explore these ramifications in the new legal landscape developing in the late modern Nordic countries, the volume also broadens its perspective in order to probe legal contexts in other countries where new trajectories, and possibilities, impinge on how cultural manifestations of law change the way we understand law and, thus, changes law itself.