Abstract

Law as Art presents a radical new legal theory, the Law as Art Hypothesis, which conceives law, not as a system of rules, but as a distinctive kind of art work. Law is differentiated as art by the Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis, which uses the heuristic metaphor of the Operatic Music Drama, the most elementally complex compound art form, to develop an idea of legal art as a distinctive empowered text, supported by the arts of drama, painting, sculpture, dress-design, architecture, rhetoric and communication to form an elementally developed yet integrated unitary art work. Part I develops a new realist epistemology to support a contemporary action-type ontology of art, differentiated as art by virtue of its artistic value. Part II opens with a critical review of the arts in legal theory, before detailing the Law as Art and Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis and locating them within contemporary scholarship. Legal philosophical implications are considered and there is an acronym key and glossary, bibliography and index.