The emblem book was invented by the humanist lawyer Andrea Alciato in 1531. The preponderance of juridical and normative themes, of images of rule and infraction, of obedience and error in the emblem books is critical to their purpose and interest. This book outlines the history of the emblem tradition as a juridical genre, along with the concept of, and training in, obiter depicta, in things seen along the way to judgment. It argues that these books depict norms and abuses in classically derived forms that become the visual standards of governance. Despite the plethora of vivid figures and virtual symbols that define and transmit law, contemporary lawyers are not trained in the critical apprehension of the visible. This book is the first to reconstruct the history of the emblem tradition, evidencing the extent to which a gallery of images of law already exists and structuring how the public realm is displayed, made present and viewed.

It was the classical task of legal rhetoric to make law both seen and understood. These conjoint goals came to be separated and opposed in modernity and a degree of blindness ensued. Legal reason was increasingly deemed to be a purely textual enterprise. Against this constraint and in furtherance of an incipient visual turn in legal studies, Genealogies of Legal Vision seeks to revive the classical ars iuris and to this end traces the history of regimes of visual control. Law always relied in significant measure upon the use of visual representations, upon pictures, architecture, costume and statuary to convey authority and sovereign norm. Military, religious, administrative and legal insignia found juridical codification and expression in collections of signs of office, in heraldic codes, in genealogical devices, and then finally in the juridical invention in the mid-sixteenth century of the legal emblem book. Genealogies of Legal Vision 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 into the multiple new technologies and novel media of contemporary governance. Bringing together leading experts on the history and art of legal emblems this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity.

How might law matter to the humanities? How might the humanities matter to law? In its approach to both of these questions, The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities shows how rich a resource the law is for humanistic study, as well as how and why the humanities are vital for understanding law. Tackling questions of method, key themes and concepts, and a variety of genres and areas of the law, this collection of essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines illuminates new questions and articulates an exciting new agenda for scholarship in law and humanities.

This book is the first book to look closely and critically at the history of images of law.

A remnant of the Renaissance : the transnational iconography of justice -- Civic space, the public square, and good governance -- Obedience : the judge as the loyal servant of the state -- Of eyes and ostriches -- Why eyes? : color, blindness, and impartiality -- Representations and abstractions : identity, politics, and rights -- From seventeenth-century town halls to twentieth-century courts -- A building and litigation boom in Twentieth-Century federal courts -- Late Twentieth-Century United States courts : monumentality, security, and eclectic imagery -- Monuments to the present and museums of the past : national courts (and prisons) -- Constructing regional rights -- Multi-jurisdictional premises : from peace to crimes -- From "rites" to "rights" -- Courts : in and out of sight, site, and cite -- An iconography for democratic adjudication.

Originally published: 5th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956.

This study reexamines the invention of the emblem book and discusses the novel textual and pictorial means that applied to the task of transmitting knowledge. It offers a fresh analysis of Alciato’s Emblematum liber, focusing on his poetics of the emblem, and on how he actually construed emblems. It demonstrates that the “father of emblematics” had vernacular forebears, most importantly Johann von Schwarzenberg who composed two illustrated emblem books between 1510 and 1520. The study sheds light on the early development of the Latin emblem book 1531–1610, with special emphasis on the invention of the emblematic commentary, on natural history, and on advanced methods of conveying emblematic knowledge, from Junius to Vaenius.

This book examines how science fiction informs the legal imagination of technological futures. Science fiction, the contributors to this book argue, is a storehouse of images, tropes, concepts and memes that inform the legal imagination of the future, and in doing so generate impetus for change. Specifically, the contributors examine how science fictions imagine human life in space, in the digital and as formed and negotiated by corporations. They then connect this imaginary to how law should be understood in the present and changed for the future. Across the chapters, there is an urgent sense of the need for law – as it is has been, and as it might become – to order and safeguard the future for a multiplicity of vulnerable entities. This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in law and technology, legal theory, cultural legal studies and law and the humanities.

The third edition of this work sets out a comprehensive and analytical manual of international humanitarian law, accompanied by case analysis and extensive explanatory commentary by a team of distinguished and internationally renowned experts.

The contributions to this volume were written by historians, legal historians and art historians, each using his or her own methods and sources, but all concentrating on topics from the broad subject of historical legal iconography. How have the concepts of law and justice been represented in (public) art from the Late Middle Ages onwards? Justices and rulers had their courtrooms, but also churches, decorated with inspiring images. At first, the religious influence was enormous, but starting with the Early Modern Era, new symbols and allegories began appearing. Throughout history, art has been used to legitimise the act of judging, but artists have also satirised the law and the lawyers; architects and artisans have engaged in juridical and judicial projects and, in some criminal cases, convicts have even been sentenced to produce works of art. The book illustrates and contextualises the various interactions between law and justice on the one hand, and their artistic representations in paintings, statues, drawings, tapestries, prints and books on the other.