I am pleased to announce the publication of my essay “Presence and Obligation: Why Techno-Digital Spectacle Cannot Legitimate Law’s Claim to Power” in International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication.

Abstract

Law’s legitimation takes place within a field of wonder and sacrifice. Wonder comes when we feel the presence of uncontainable excess, a powerful and always incompletely assimilable sense of meaning and value. When a community, or a state, names that excess—which is what charters and constitutions are for—it stakes a claim to collective identity. Constitutional naming, and the legacy it generates, binds a nation in an act of collective responsibility for what is named.

Without wonder the rule of law becomes self-validating. But self-validation lacks transcendental reference. Law’s authority remains immanent to the legal system itself. So, if rules of recognition and validity are nominally posited, on what basis could we judge one legal system to be illegitimate or immoral as compared to another? More troubling still, if wonder in the face of something transcendent (law’s extra-legal source) is a prerequisite to legitimation, how could any legal system devoid of transcendent value call itself legitimate?

The contemporary crisis of legitimation is particularly acute in the currently dominant attention economy where acts of social and commercial exchange online endlessly re-produce mutating forms of identity (the “branded” or “profiletic” self) cast in the image of consumption. This incessant digital semiosis, which the society of techno-spectacle aspires to normalize, provides no place or opening (“khora”) for the advent and ensuing expressive mediation of an excess out of which foundational constitutive values and beliefs acquire temporal form.

See Sherwin, R.K. (2026). Presence and Obligation: Why Techno-Digital Spectacle Cannot Legitimate Law’s Claim to Power. In: Wagner, A. (eds) International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87993-7_29-1

“Law and Visual Culture,” chapter in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture (forthcoming); 

“Law’s Screen Life,” chapter in Elgar Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (forthcoming);

“Escalus’s Dream:  Re-Imagining Shakespeare’s States,” chapter in Subha Mukherji, et. al., Knowing Judgments: Literature and the Legal Imaginary, Palgrave Macmillan (2024);

“Sovereign Imaginaries: Visualizing the Sacred Foundation of Law’s Authority,” chapter in Benjamin Porat and David Flatto, Law as Religion, Religion as Law, Cambridge University Press (2022).

“Post-secular Jurisprudence: A Visual Semiotics of the Sacred Source of Law’s Authority,” chapter in Robert Yelle, Massimo Leone, and Jenny Ponzo (editors), Mediation and Immediacy: A Key Issue for the Semiotics of Religion,” De Gruyter Press (2021);

“What Authorizes the Image? The Visual Economy of Post-Secular Jurisprudence,” chapter in Desmond Manderson, ed., Law  and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique,  University of Toronto Press (2018);

"Law Frames: Historical Truth and Narrative Necessity in a Criminal Case," chapter in: Popular Culture and Law, (R.K. Sherwin, ed. (2006); Trials (M. Umphrey ed., 2008) and Law and Popular Culture (David Papke, ed., 2012).

“Constitutional Purgatory: Shades and Presences Inside the Courtroom,” in Leif Dahlberg, ed. Visualizing Law and Authority (Walter de Gruyter 2012);

“Law’s Life on the Screen,” in Sara Steinert-Borella’s and Caroline Wiedmer’s Intersections of Law and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan Socio-Legal Studies 2012);

“Screening the Law,” in A. Sarat ed. Imagining Legality (Alabama, 2011); 

“Imagining Law as Film: Representation without Reference?” chapter in Introduction to Law and the Humanities, (Austin Sarat, Matthew Anderson, Catherine Frank eds., Cambridge University Press 2010);

“What Screen Do You Have in Mind? Contesting the Visual Context of Law and Film Studies,” chapter in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (A. Sarat ed., Elsevier 2009);

“Law in the Age of Images,” chapter in James Elkins, ed., Visual Literacy in Action (Routledge 2007);

 “The Challenge of Visual Literacy: Law in the Age of Images,” (with Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel), in Contemporary Issues in the Semiotics of Law, (Oñati International Series in Law and Society; Hart Publishers, 2005).