Aesthetic judgment and legal justification

Abstract

Although criticized as illegitimate, literary elements are necessary features of legal argument. In a modern liberal state, law motivates compliance by justifying controversial prescriptions as products of an appropriate process for representing the will of society. Yet because law constructs the will of individual and collective actors in representing them, its representations are necessarily figurative rather than mimetic. In evaluating law's representation of society, citizens of the liberal state are also shaping their own ends. Such self-expressive choices, subjective but non-instrumental, entail aesthetic judgment. Thus the literary elements of rhetorical figuration and aesthetic appeal are fundamental, rather than merely ornamental, to legal justification.

Citation

Binder, G. (2008), "Aesthetic judgment and legal justification", Sarat, A. (Ed.) Special Issue Law and Literature Reconsidered (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 43), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 79-112. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00604-7