Synesthetic Legalities

Synesthesia is the phenomenon where sensual perceptions are joined together as a combined experience – that is, the ability to feel color, hear the visual, or even smell emotion. These types of unions expand the normativity of our legal thinking, as the abilities to represent the tethering of emotion, place, and concept to law are magnified. In this way, interpretations of law and legal phenomena that are enriched with embodied meaning contribute to our understanding of how law works – namely through sensory input, sensory output, and the attachment that happens within these sensory unions. This edited volume explores the richly complex manifestations of synesthesia and law drawing from a plurality of approaches, including legal studies, philosophy, social science, linguistics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities. Contributions in the volume discuss how we feel/taste/smell/see/hear law within the synesthetic scope of legal interpretation, legal consciousness, and legal culture. The collection examines aspects of embodiment, place, and presence that constitutively frame law amidst social, cultural, and historical contexts.

'A surprising and savory smörgåsbord of sensory stipulations. Synesthestic Legalities brings a brilliant and diverse array of scholarly attentions to the frequently misunderstood embodiments of law. The corpus iuris here becomes real, and the process of apprehending its foods, its tastes, its music, its flatness and protrusions, hauntings and the other odours of order, take in properly theatrical fashion to the jurisprudential stage.'Professor Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law, USA‘The book flies us to Hawaï, its volcano’s and metaphors. Legal semiotics tells us there, that law involves all our senses and experiences. A feeling of revolt awakens, if that approach is fragmented. Only the peace of rational and sensual wholeness will be felt as meaningful. Law without senses is senseless — can you hear me?’ Professor Jan M. Broekman, University of Leuven, Belgium and Penn State, USA'Synesthetic Legalities builds on the connection between law and the senses, which is vigorously re-explored in the literature, fortified by law’s material and corporeal turns. But it takes it a step further: it brings in synesthetic, namely the sensorial overlapping where the cause does not determine the effect in a mechanistic manner, but allows for the emergence of a plethora of creative possibilities. Synesthetic Legalities is nothing less than a kaleidoscope of sensorial inputs, ranging from taste to the kinaesthetic, via such varied embodiments as dance, sketching, and ethics of care, all wrapped in the intense sensuality of volcanic ethics. The taste of law will never sound the same after reading this book.'Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster, UK

Sarah Marusek is an Associate Professor of Public Law in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. Her research interests focus on sites of constitutive law, legal geography, and legal semiotics while engaging legal pluralist frameworks of visual jurisprudence. She has published widely on these and related areas.