Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Rights
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.
Publication Title
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
First Page
79
Last Page
112
Recommended Citation
Guyora Binder,
Aesthetic Judgment and Legal Justification,
43
Stud. L. Pol. & Soc'y
79
(2007).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/journal_articles/276