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Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world.

This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.

An illustrated story of the relationship between mapping and secrecy, charting the role maps played in concealing and revealing knowledge across centuries.

Is there anything more intriguing than a secret map? One that reveals clandestine information or meanings, or a map that is itself a secret? Secret Maps features over one hundred examples of these kinds of maps, connected by their varied relationships to secrecy, and ranging from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries and across the globe. They include views into state secrecy and power—such as maps used for domestic and military purposes, imperial expansion, espionage, and surveillance as well as those with private or commercial uses, such as charts of private land, trade routes, or the flights of private jets. The maps span widely in their scope and cover issues of broad interest, from old-fashioned spying to contemporary concerns about technology and privacy.

As illuminating as it is thrilling, Secret Maps unearths the once-hidden routes, landscapes, and locations that have covertly shaped our world.

Seeing to See focuses on two American authors who are notoriously hard to classify: Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau. Dickinson proves challenging due to her short and obscure poems and Thoreau due to his insistence on capturing even the most seemingly mundane information. Daniel A. Nelson uncovers evidence that the works of these authors are often intentionally and painstakingly without aim or purpose. He argues that in their texts there is in fact an avoidance of teleological structures of writing and thinking, whereby a thing’s—or a word’s, or a text’s—value hinges on its relation to the world or other contexts.

In Nelson’s reading, Thoreau and Dickinson seem to be able to set aside all thought of distinct personal and professional goals, through which readers typically try to make an overarching sense out of, and to derive some form of profit from, disparate experiences, events, actions, and feelings. Further, both authors seem to be able to get outside of the worldview according to which the value and meaning of something, be it a natural object, a word, or an experience, is a function of its participation in a larger system. Examples of such systems include an ecosystem, taxonomic system, or syntactic system; a writer’s career, or life, or philosophy; even a single poem or journal entry. In the absence of such connections to broader categorical spheres, both writers force readers to contemplate the ineffable, constantly changing relation between words and the natural world. This contemporary reading of two iconic writers reframes their work and how readers think of nature, accepting, as these authors did, the potential freedom of the unknown.