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Overview
Law and aesthetics draws on the work of poets as well as philosophers. Taking as its starting point Shelley's assertion that poets are unacknowledged legislators, the book suggests that there is a way of thinking that, as yet, has not been taken up by those who make use of literary aesthetics to understand law. The book tracks this aesthetic thinking through the failures of critical legal studies and stages an encounter with psychoanalysis, before suggesting that an aesthetics of law can be exhumed from Nietzsche's work. The aesthetic is a call to the creative: fashion new law.Synopsis
Can an aesthetics of law address the morality that law is supposed to uphold? Gearey (law, U. of London) argues that it can and it must. He elucidates a theory of law that draws on the Nietzschean inversion of morality and aesthetics, in which the highest morality is human creativity and the overcoming of one's limits. The discussion reaches the conclusion that moral standards are always the product of time and place. Noting that poets have been called "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Gearey concludes the work with a discussion of the poetry of Shelley as it relates to a new theory of legal justice. Distributed in the US by ISBS.
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