The Aesthetic Authority of Law : Experiments with Legal Form
The legal form dictates the contours of law’s appearance. Texts are neatly divided into (often) numbered paragraphs. Pages must conform to specified layouts. Conventions regulate the use of fonts, punctuation and colours. Legal terms of art replace colloquial expressions. Human experiences enter legal texts only in mediated, sanitized forms. The dictats of legal form are all but incidental. They c