Seeing Law: The Comic, Icon and the Image in Law and Justice

This special issue examines how the comic and the icon prefigure forms of legality that are different to modern law. There is a primal seeing of law unmediated by reading, writing or possibly thinking. This introduction identifies the primacy of the eye, the emergence of visual jurisprudence and the transformations of law as a paper-based material practice to a digitally enabled activity.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of LawFull Tex

In Search of a Trade Mark: Search Practices and Bureaucratic Poetics

Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself

The Laws of Image-nation: Brazilian racial tropes and the shadows of the slave quarters

CAPES Foundation, Proc. N. 09912-1; Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck Law School and the Law and Image Reading Group funded and organized the ‘Law and Image Symposium’

Recht künstlich

Rezensiertes Werk:Kunst als Strafe. Zur Ästhetik der Disziplinierung, hg. von Gertrud Koch, Sylvia Sasse u. Ludger Schwarte, München: Wilhelm Fink 2003, 229 S., ISBN 3-7705-3771-