The Law of Beauty: The Troubled Relationship Between Law and Aesthetics

This book examines the longstanding, yet ambiguous and deeply complex, relationship between law and aesthetics.

Despite numerous studies dedicated to the topic, the relationship between aesthetics and law tends to be interpreted as one between two approaches, two thematic horizons, two disciplines, or two distinct semantic universes. Conversely, the book argues that legal phenomena cannot be properly understood without grasping the relevance of aesthetics within the experience of law itself, nor the intrinsically political and regulatory character of aesthetic experience, considering how it shapes our social world by affecting people as sensate bodies. The book examines a series of current issues that arise from the ambiguous relationship between law and aesthetics, such as the legal status of aesthetic objects, the aesthetic analysis of legal texts, the conflicts between aesthetics and legal principles, as well as the legal relevance of ugliness. It is only by taking into account the inextricable nexus between aesthetics and aesthesis, that is, both the epistemological level and the question of how people see, hear, and feel, that we can understand these issues.

This book will appeal to scholars and students in legal theory and philosophers with interests in law and aesthetics.