The Aesthetic Authority of Law: Experiments with Legal Form

The legal form dictates the contours of law’s appearance. Texts are neatly divided into (often) numbered paragraphs. Pages must conform to specified layouts. Conventions regulate the use of fonts, punctuation and colours. Legal terms of art replace colloquial expressions. Human experiences enter legal texts only in mediated, sanitized forms. The dictats of legal form are all but incidental. They condition law’s authority. By repeatedly modifying the Case of the S.S. Lotus (Permanent Court of International Justice 1927), this book invites readers to consider how modifications of law’s appearance alter law’s authority.

Valentin Jeutner is an Associate Professor of Law at Lund University, Sweden, and a Senior Retained Lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford, UK.