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Bildregime des Rechts

Reihe Reflexiv series
Date of release: September 2007
Jean-Baptiste Joly, Cornelia Vismann, Thomas Weitin (ed.)

A multitude of overlaps exists between the visual and legal worlds. One of the most obvious may be the court scene, in which images are presented as evidence and as an emblem. Surveillance videos or photos are supposed to make a perpetration evident, courtroom architecture and robes is intended to lend justice an emblematic appearance. The areas of law and image also overlap in questions of copyright and patent. Ultimately in legal history, there are innumerable cases on the topic of image, image conflicts, forbidden images.

Yet the question of the image regimes of law also owes its current importance in the observation that the legal framework of images is increasingly weakening. The law is on the brink of losing its hegemony over images’ representation and circulation. The present discussion on the power of images signalizes if not a shift of power, at least a loss of power on the side of the law.

The essays by legal experts, political scientists, art historians, philosophers and literary scientists united in this volume illuminate not only the history of a functioning “image regime” but also the results of its disturbances and shift from an interdisciplinary perspective. They are culled from the symposium “Bildregime des Rechts (Image Regime of the Law)”, initiated by Cornelia Vismann and Thomas Weitin, which took place in fall 2005 as part of the art, science and business program at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Cornelia Vismann, born in 1961, is a research associate at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. She studied legal sciences and philosophy in Freiburg, Hamburg and Berlin. After working as a lawyer in Berlin, she worked as a research associate as the Einstein Forum foundation in Potsdam as well as at the Cultural and Legal department at the Europa-University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder. Vismann was a fellow at the Scientific College in Berlin in 2003, a research fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, IFK Vienna in 2003-4 and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in London in 2005-6.

Thomas Weitin is assistant professor for Modern German Literature in European Context at the University of Konstanz. Beforehand, he was a research assistant at the German Literary Sciences Institute of the Wilhelms-Universität Münster (2004-2007). From 2002 to 2004 he did postdoctoral studies at Berlin’s Humboldt University’s graduate seminar and at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. In 2005, he was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Professorial dissertation: »Zeugenschaft in der deutschen Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts« (Ms.) (»Testimony in German Literature of the 18th and 19th Century«). Recent publication: »Urteilen/Entscheiden« (»Judge/Decide«) (edited with Cornelia Vismann, Munich 2006).

Authors: Friedrich Balke / Claudia Blümle / André Brodocz / Matthias Bruhn / Monika Dommann / Chrisine Karallus / Alexander R. Klett / Werner Leitner / Kristin Marek / Eberhard Ortland / Hania Siebenpfeiffer / Fabian Steinhauer
Category: art, science & business / Reihe Reflexiv
Language: German
Pages: 322
Price: 14,90 Euro
ISBN: 978-3-937158-15-0

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