This book presents an interdisciplinary study of the relation between semiotics, law & art. Focusing on Greimasian semiotics, it examines specific works of art (from Giotto to Banksy) that deal with the theme of justice, promoting a more sensitive and humanized perception of the values that surround law. The book offers readers a comprehensive review of the semiotics of law, critically examining the relation between law & art. It covers a variety of topics, including semiotics, law and art; semiotics, art and experience; and society, law and art, as well as semiotics, law and painting; semiotics, law and architecture; semiotics, law and theatre; semiotics, law and literature; and semiotics, law and culture. In doing so, it uses the semiotics of painting to explain the symbology of justice and its significance in history; the semiotics of architecture to explain the setting of justice; the semiotics of theatre to explain the logic of the legal process; and the semiotics of literature to explain the narrative logic of legal decisions. Lastly, drawing on the semiotics of culture, it discusses ways of promoting justice, citizenship and human rights. Written from both philosophical and semiotical perspectives, the book enhances the centrality of visual jurisprudence studies to promote a better understanding of the role of law.

Violations of international law and human rights laws are the plague of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Violence and the flagrant violation of human rights have a naturally dramatic effect that inspires writers, film makers, artists, philosophers, historians, and legal scholars to represent these horrors in their work. In Decoding International Law: Semiotics and the Humanities, Professor Tiefenbrun helps readers understand international law as represented indirectly in the humanities.

Reading art from a semiotic perspective, this book offers a new interpretation of the development of Chinese landscape painting and outlines a new framework for contemporary semiotics and critical theory. It will appeal to those interested in visual art, Chinese studies, critical theory, semiotics, and other relevant fields, and will allow the reader to learn how to put theory into the practice of studying art, how to give new life to an important theory, and how to acquire a new point of view in appreciating and enjoying art with a certain critical theory.

This book present a structure for understanding and exploring the semiotic character of law and law systems. Cultivating a deep understanding for the ways in which lawyers make meaning—the way in which they help make the world and are made, in turn by the world they create —can provide a basis for consciously engaging in the work of the law and in the production of meaning. The book first introduces the reader to the idea of semiotics in general and legal semiotics in particular, as well as to the major actors and shapers of the field, and to the heart of the matter: signs. The second part studies the development of the strains of thinking that together now define semiotics, with attention being paid to the pragmatics, psychology and language of legal semiotics. A third part examines the link between legal theory and semiotics, the practice of law, the critical legal studies movement in the USA, the semiotics of politics and structuralism. The last part of the book ties the different strands of legal semiotics together, and closely looks at semiotics in the lawyer’s toolkit—such as: text, name and meaning. ​

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.

​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

No detailed description available for "Semiotics and Iconography".

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a ‘must read’ that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture & Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law’s representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities & the Arts, Australian National University, Australia

This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an overview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series aims for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end strives for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The language of publication is English. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will is imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume is a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editors of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editors only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume. To discuss your handbook idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.