Law tends to hide itself, appearing for all to see only in the hush of the courtroom, the police officer’s shouted command or in our dry, formal acts like contracting or mortgaging. However, law is present all around us, it is in the spaces that we inhabit, in our voices and actions, in the atmosphere of public order. Law silently and subtly opens spaces for particular forms of activity. It no longer acts as the spectacular sovereign command or prohibition, but as a generalized conditioning. However, when law becomes all-pervasive, it becomes difficult to appreciate its specific role in shaping our everyday life. The challenge therefore, is not simply to notice that the law becomes part of the ‘order of things’ through regulations, intellectual property or contracts for purchase. It lies in connecting up the various, and often carefully occluded, ways in which we are affected by the force of law.

The project gathers a number of key legal scholars to investigate different ways in which we might engage with the ‘conditions of perceptibility of law’. In particular, it proposes to focus upon ‘legal aesthetics’. This is often taken to refer to either the manner in which law is represented in film, literature, and other cultural sources, or the manner in which legal decisions might be analysed through the resources of the humanities (by reading legal judgments as literature, for instance). This project, however, proposes a third sense of ‘legal aesthetics’, arguing that it might be used to understand the ways in which law is felt, sensed, seen, as well as being invisibilised, dissimulated and generally rendered imperceptible. Aesthetics refers to ‘the conditions of sensory perception’, reflecting the term’s etymological roots (aisthesthai). Legal aesthetics therefore becomes the site from which we might think the conditions in which law becomes perceptible.