In Law and the Visual, leading legal theorists, art historians, and critics come together to present new work examining the intersection between legal and visual discourses. Proceeding chronologically, the volume offers leading analyses of the juncture between legal and visual culture as witnessed from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Editor Desmond Manderson provides a contextual introduction that draws out and articulates three central themes: visual representations of the law, visual technologies in the law, and aesthetic critiques of law. A ground breaking contribution to an increasingly vibrant field of inquiry, Law and the Visual will inform the debate on the relationship between legal and visual culture for years to come.

This essential handbook offers art professionals and collectors an accessible legal analysis of important principles in art law, as well as a practical guide to legal rights when creating, buying, selling and collecting art in a global market. Although the book is international in scope, there is a particular focus on the US as a major art centre and the site of countless key international court cases. This authoritative but accessible and wide-ranging volume is essential reading for arts advisors, collectors, dealers, auction houses, museums, investors, artists, attorneys and students of art and law.

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials. The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, this book examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity. This original and insightful engagement with the relationship between law and the visual will appeal to legal and cultural theorists, as well as those with more specific interests in Stalinism, and in Central, East, and Southeast European history.

How might law matter to the humanities? How might the humanities matter to law? In its approach to both of these questions, The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities shows how rich a resource the law is for humanistic study, as well as how and why the humanities are vital for understanding law. Tackling questions of method, key themes and concepts, and a variety of genres and areas of the law, this collection of essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines illuminates new questions and articulates an exciting new agenda for scholarship in law and humanities.