Making sense of law: pungency, feel and rhythm

Socio-legal and critical scholars have long argued that lawyers’ obsession with the word and text limits their appreciation of how law is experienced, or authority is generated, through touch, smell, sight and sound. At the same time, architectural scholars and art historians have contended that the sensory bias of their disciplines towards sight is problematic because it can serve to disengage habitable space and images from a richer experience of their particular place and context. The articles in this issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities argue for the need to explore the phenomenology of law by attending to a panoply of sensory dynamics. By facilitating a broader engagement with experiences of legal spaces, concepts, objects, procedures and their regulation it seeks to consider how spatial experience, scale, depth, sound and tactility inform experiences of substantive law, legal rituals and justice procedures. In short, this special issue seeks to examine how law and the things and processes it controls look, smell and sound.