Law & Society ReviewVolume 53, Issue 4 p. 1382-1385 Book Review Of Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing. By Thomas Giddens. London & New York: Routledge, 2018 Reviewed by Julia J.A. Shaw, Corresponding Author Reviewed by Julia J.A. Shaw jshaw@dmu.ac.uk School of Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, UKPlease direct all correspondence to e-mail: jshaw@dmu.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Reviewed by Julia J.A. Shaw, Corresponding Author Reviewed by Julia J.A. Shaw jshaw@dmu.ac.uk School of Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, UKPlease direct all correspondence to e-mail: jshaw@dmu.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 November 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12446Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume53, Issue4December 2019Pages 1382-1385 RelatedInformation

Although the sheer technicality of the law’s concepts and categories often inhibits any discussion of their own premises, literature is able to illuminate the world by means of imagistic language, elucidating important moral values and social ideas. Therefore, historically, philosophical writings, literary texts and tropes have been important sources of reference and inspiration in the formation of key legal concepts such as justice, rights, authority, freedom and equality. The relationship between law and literature is nothing new as both are cultural practices and share a mutual interest in meaning-making. Just as art is said to imitate life, law emulates life through invention and fiction. This chapter explores the significance of a literary imagination to lawmakers and legal scholars alike, particularly in response to the modern moral and legal dilemmas posed by our increasingly complex society.

Music is an inescapable part of social, cultural and political life, and has played a powerful role in mobilising support for popular movements demanding social justice. The impact of David Bowie, Prince and Bob Dylan, for example, on diversity awareness and legislative reform relating to sexuality, gender and racial equality respectively is still felt; with the latter receiving a Nobel Prize in 2016 for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The influence of these composers and performers reached far beyond the concert hall. Conversely, musical propaganda has been a common feature of many dictatorships, most notably Nazism’s Adolf Hitler and Communism’s Joseph Stalin, and is still instrumental in the election campaigns of political parties. US President Donald Trump’s winning retro classic rock campaign playlist conveyed an idealised version of the past which aligned with the tastes and interests of his core constituency, and evoked feelings of nationalistic pride and patriotism. The eclectic selection of upbeat music effectively masked the underlying capitalist initiatives, corporate greed and allegations of financial impropriety that characterised both the Democrat and Republican campaigns. Although unable to impart meaning with the same level of precision as language, music has a potentially broader semantic capacity due to its greater elasticity. It constitutes a common language which has the ability to create a community of people that sings, speaks, reasons, votes and even feels the same way. Accordingly, this article explores the symbiotic relationship between music and law, identity politics and social justice, via the lens of musical semiosis.

As a normative discipline, law defines its territory according to simple categories which establish absolute principles purporting to offer a single truth as to what is just and unjust, right and wrong, good and bad. In addition, linguistic and extrasemantic devices such as synecdoche, metonymy, rhythm and metaphor serve a referential function with which to penetrate the collective consciousness. The core assumptions derived from the implementation of socio-linguistic mechanisms transform the nature of legal analysis and are embedded within a diverse interplay of meanings. Aesthetic imaginings are evidenced to underpin and sustain ‘law’s symbolic processes and doctrines, institutions and ideas; that is, a realm of limitless fantasy, of free-flowing nomological desire, fixed around, and fixated upon controlling images that condense its central juridical concepts’; as the ‘jurists follow their own poetic and aesthetic criteria, their own spectral laws’ (MacNeil in Novel judgments: legal theory as fiction. Routledge, Oxford, p 9, 2012; Goodrich in Legal emblems and the art of law: obiter depicta as the vision of governance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 155, 2013). Yet still, founded on the negation of its own history, legal practice maintains that juridical arguments comprise only dialectical reasoning about objectively determined concepts: ‘law is a literature which denies its literary qualities. It is a play of words which asserts an absolute seriousness; it is a genre of rhetoric which represses its moments of invention or fiction… it is procedure based upon analogy, metaphor and repetition [that] lays claim to being a cold or disembodied prose’ (Goodrich in Law in the courts of love: literature and other minor jurisprudences. Routledge, Oxford, p 112, 1996). This article will explore the continuing commitment of modern legal practice to particular aesthetic values and how these are crucially implicated in a variety of legal competencies including the formation of key legal concepts and general intellectual activity.

The production of space is dependent on a variety of social practices and physical conditions, meaning the experience of space and time varies between particular individuals, groups and cultures: 'Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built' [H Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (Verso, London 1991) 232]. Just as social models and relationships are contingent upon and shaped by large-scale policies and organising mechanisms such as almanacs, calendars and maps; cultural norms and economic prospects are also influenced by temporal and spatial structures. The spatial turn provides a material grounding from which to address the erosion of jurisdiction in a world of algorithms, globalisation and advanced capitalism. By reconsidering the means by which the physical infrastructure is allocated and appropriated by citizens across the socioeconomic spectrum, it moves towards an understanding of how social justice expresses itself in the technologically mediated urban environment. The spatial concept of the Anthropocene provides a further opportunity to explore the ontological distinction between humanity and nature, as the pace of technological advancement continues to outstrip our potential to control these new sites of opportunity and exclusion.