Can Law Be Art?
29 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2020
Date Written: October 1, 2014
Abstract
This article -- my part of a festschrift in my honor for which I will be forever grateful -- asks, as other have, if law can be art. The answer it offers is "yes," but with the qualification that we recover a sense of law's connection to truth as aletheia as I argue in the article. To make this argument I examine the painting in the Chauvet Cave as a way of understanding what being "art" means and how it can be connected to truth, and then examine a recovery of art's connection to truth in the work of Kandinsky as guidance for a recovery of the same in law.
Note: I'll post a shorter version of this, one presented as a paper at ASLCH in 2015 without footnotes and supporting materials, later on. Please note that the color prints are missing from this version. They are available online.
Keywords: law as art, aesthetics, Chauvet, Kandinsky, Heidegger, truth, aletheia, painting, Klee, justice, beauty, legal ethics, jurisprudence, Hegel, internal, external, ontology, cultural realism
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