Back to results
Cover image for book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry

Artefacts of Legal Inquiry

The Value of Imagination in Adjudication
By:Maksymilian Del Mar
Publisher:Bloomsbury UK
Print ISBN:9781509955046
eText ISBN:9781509936199
Edition:1
Format:Reflowable

eBook Features

Instant Access

Purchase and read your book immediately

Read Offline

Access your eTextbook anytime and anywhere

Study Tools

Built-in study tools like highlights and more

Read Aloud

Listen and follow along as Bookshelf reads to you

Winner of the 2022 Commendation for Excellence by the International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy (IVR).

What is the value of fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios in adjudication? This book develops three models to help answer that question: inquiry, artefacts and imagination.

Legal language, it is argued, contains artefacts – forms that signal their own artifice and call upon us to do things with them. To imagine, in turn, is to enter a distinctive epistemic frame where we temporarily suspend certain epistemic norms and commitments and participate actively along a spectrum of affective, sensory and kinesic involvement.

The book argues that artefacts and related processes of imagination are valuable insofar as they enable inquiry in adjudication, ie the social (interactive and collective) process of making insight into what values, vulnerabilities and interests might be at stake in a case and in similar cases in the future.

Artefacts of Legal Inquiry is structured in two parts, with the first offering an account of the three models of inquiry, artefacts and imagination, and the second examining four case studies (fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios).

Drawing on a broad range of theoretical traditions – including philosophy of imagination and emotion, the theory and history of rhetoric, and the cognitive humanities – this book offers an interdisciplinary defence of the importance of artefactual language and imagination in adjudication.