Marett Leiboff

Ghosts of Law and Humanities (Past, Present, Future)

Abstract This introductory essay teases out the ghosts of a Law and Humanities Past to find an unlikely candidate as an advocate for a relationship between law and the humanities: Sir William Blackstone. In contemplating what constitutes Law and Humanities Futures, it is apparent that law has forgotten about this past, and has created an imagined present for law, absent the humanities. In introducing the special issue on Law and Humanities Futures, the essay weaves the story of Otto Kahn-Freund and the concept of Bildung or ‘formation’ with Kahn-Freund’s advocacy—using Blackstone—for its importance in the training of lawyers. In drawing upon Goethe, Yes Minister, and the Oxford of the 1950s and 1960s and Nazi Germany, this account humanises the humanities through Kahn-Freund, a refugee German Jewish labour lawyer, in order to make the claim that the humanities are fundamentally aligned with the civil and civilising. However, to dissociate the human from humanities can lead to the uncivil and inhumane. Drawing upon history and various modes of culture, the essay asserts that Bildung lights a path for law through the intersections and interdisciplines that constitute and shape the humanities in their broadest conception, of the human, of the civil, and the civilising—those concepts and ideas that we can see in and of the past and present—and to reveal what might be missing from law and humanities futures.

'DITTO': law, pop culture and humanities and the impact of intergenerational interpretative dissonance

Abstract Building on Julius Stone’s remark that jurisprudence is law’s extroversion (or extraversion), this essay explores the consequences that flow from the loss of a shared humanities discourse by lawyers. In adapting the concept of extraversion to those things about us in the world, the essay considers the finding of an empirical study, Law’s Gens Project, which revealed a profound, almost seismic shift in what different generational groupings of lawyers know, based in the humanities, placing this point of rupture squarely in the 1970s. Drawing on allusions and cultural references used in judgments, this project reveals how these cultural markers affect legal interpretation. Generational slippages arise when shared humanities discourses are lost. It is thus necessary to think about what happens when the texts of law can no longer be read when the arsenal needed to read them canonically disappears—that is, when it is no longer possible to read the texts as they were intended, not because of any change in legal knowledge in its barest sense, but when the humanities discourses needed to decode their meanings are lost.

The embodiment of culture: the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986 (Cth)

(1999). The Embodiment Of Culture: The Protection Of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986 (Cth). Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 3-19.

Do You See What I See? Iconic Art and Culture and the Judicial Eye in Australian Law

Visuals and images challenge law’s positivistic faith: they are ambiguous and threatening to law’s stability precisely because they cannot be corralled into a safe territory – unless they are read literally. Because they are always open to interpretation, law will rein them into a reading that suits and that does not transgress, for instance, sanctioned narratives or accounts of national identities. A ‘juridical-aesthetic state of exception’ enables the courts, as sovereign, to create and constitute the aesthetic mode in which visuals and images are read, allowing them to radically create and recreate the image or visual to achieve a desired aesthetic or political reading. By being ‘rule-exempt’, the courts create the law of the visual as they go along, saturating them with meanings as they choose, deploying interpretations and readings of images as it suits. Their purported indifference is made in deference to art, but as I suggest, the very act of disengagement is ascriptive, through the intervention of the judicial eye. In its place, I suggest the deployment of a Panofskian iconological schema in order to give law some tools to assist with the reading of images beyond the literal and formal. It is precisely for the reasons that Panofsky is criticised by art historians that I see a value in the use of this hermeneutic in the legal context through its creation of a ‘synthetic intuition’. Iconology not only demonstrates that empiricist and literal readings of images and visuals are misleading and partial, but its schema offers a certainty and methodological rigour enabling ‘the vibe’ of art, culture and images to move from being a mere feeling to something which can be ascertained through a method, providing a sense of certainty while curtailing unbounded interpretations that abound in the juridical-aesthetic state of exception.