The Law and the Statuesque

Abstract

Law and literature, an exemplary product of the textual turn in the study of culture, has found itself challenged by the more recent visual turn in critical thought. However, debate hitherto has been largely based on a two-dimensional approach to the visual. By going beyond the metaphor of the ‘legal screen’ in favour of a theory of the ‘statuesque’, this essay adds a new dimension to the way we think about the force of law in culture. Drawing on eighteenth-century and contemporary aesthetic theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century public art, the article presents an account of the political aesthetics of law in which a place for the possibility of justice may be made.