As the late, great legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick insisted, modern law vacillates between openness and closure, indeterminacy and determinacy (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2001). The law must be open to a multiplicity of acts and forms of knowledge, requiring legal practitioners to engage with any and all of the discourses and disciplines that come before them and that are relevant to advice or adjudication. This openness to an indeterminate set of facts, knowledges, and practices is counterposed by the demand – made by those who turn to the law – for closure, determinacy, and an authoritative assignation of responsibilities. This view situates the jurist as a kind of translator, tasked with rendering an open-ended set of nonlegal discourses meaningful, and ultimately determinate, in legal terms.
Within environmental law, this process of legal translation is often concerned with scientific knowledge. How can the findings of ecologists, climate scientists, oceanographers, and others inform legal reasoning? What rules of procedure allow for such knowledge to be heard? And what are the skills that lawyers must acquire to render it meaningful for law? Alice Palmer’s excellent new book poses a different, often overlooked, and altogether trickier question. How does – and how should – international environmental law interpret, mediate, and deploy images of the natural world in its deliberations? How can the apparently open field of the imagistic and the aesthetic feature in the law’s efforts to provide determinacy?
Palmer addresses these questions through an examination of photographs, and other images, within three international environmental law contexts in which the question of aesthetic value is a matter of concern. The World Heritage Convention (1972) and the Biodiversity Convention (1992) both expressly refer to the aesthetic value of the natural world. And Palmer convincingly interprets The Whaling Convention (1946/1982) as implicitly mobilizing an understanding of aesthetic value that has informed decisions under the treaty. What is the role of photography in determining the meaning of aesthetic value in these contexts?
Rather than immediately move to assess the treaties and relevant decisions themselves, Palmer first leads the reader on an illuminating journey through diverse perspectives in aesthetic and legal theory. Evidencing detailed knowledge of a wide range of literatures, Palmer introduces what she calls three “vantages” from which the question of aesthetic value can be assessed: (i) environmental aesthetics, (ii) the modes of interpretation proper to international environmental law, and (iii) the aesthetics of visual art. By drawing on insights afforded by each of these vantages, Palmer contends that international environmental law can both improve its aesthetic literacy, while also augmenting the law’s capacity to protect the environment in just and reflexive ways.
Following an introduction, the next three chapters elaborate these aesthetic vantages. Chapter 2 introduces the field of environmental aesthetics, which examines the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. Here Palmer endorses Emily Brady’s (Reference Brady2003) multisensory approach, in which all the body’s senses are at play in the aesthetic appreciation of the environment, rather than visuality alone. Brady furthermore insists that aesthetic appreciation is not simply a matter of subjective judgment but is informed by plural cultures and knowledges that culminate in powerful, and publicly meaningful, aesthetic experiences. Chapter 3 surveys the hermeneutics of international environmental law that too often “conflates and displaces” (14) a distinct sense of “aesthetic value” in favor of ethical and/or instrumental values. Chapter 4 examines aesthetic theories which assess the artistic depiction of the natural world, in addition to the visual jurisprudence literature, to assess how images, representations and artworks shed new light on legal meanings.
These three aesthetic vantages allow Palmer to read a range of photographs submitted under the three international treaties mentioned above. These images, Palmer contends, are not merely communicative of objective fact. Nor are they placeholders for ethical or instrumental values, but are instead forms of representation that evidence the distinctive aesthetic value that the treaties themselves purport to defend. The analysis in chapters 5–7 amounts to a powerful entreaty to international lawyers to take both photographs (as evidentiary material) and aesthetics (as a form of knowledge) far more seriously than they currently do. As Palmer demonstrates, when photographic interpretation is informed by aesthetic theory and aesthetic jurisprudence, a staid Western-dominated aesthetics of the “picturesque” and of “natural beauty” gives way to a multisensory and pluralized approach. The argument is both a performance of and a plea for a humanistic law and legal training that is informed by aesthetic theory and knowledge.
This is an accomplished book that draws on and contributes to law and humanities scholarship to develop important insights for international environmental law. It will be read with interest by researchers and students in the fields of international law, law and humanities, jurisprudence, and law and society. Let me conclude with two brief critical remarks: the first presentational, the second more substantive.
Given the subject-matter it was a shame that the book’s photographs were not reproduced in color. The aesthetic impact of the images under consideration was significantly diminished by this choice, presumably dictated by the publisher. Each substantive chapter opens with an evocative reading of an “exhibit”: images depicting paintings, sculptures or stills from video installations. The rather meager black and white images failed to do justice to Palmers’ subtle readings of these artifacts that both illustrated the significance of the three aesthetic vantages that organized her argument and provided an engaging introduction to each chapter.
Finally, while the effort to develop a more aesthetically sensitive and theoretically sophisticated understanding of photography’s role within international law is both original and commendable, I wondered whether the aesthetic had been too readily tamed by the “legal translation” exercise in which Palmer is engaged. As aesthetic jurisprudents – not least Peter Fitzpatrick, with whom we began – have contended, the aesthetic register has a disruptive potential, reaching towards a horizon of justice that exceeds the quotidian and determinative operations of the legal order. Similarly, Jacques Rancière (Reference Rancière2009) has argued that the Kantian theme of “disinterestedness” – so important to the aesthetic theory with which Palmer engages – has important political implications. The disinterested, aesthetic gaze momentarily suspends prevailing injustices, allowing the observer to perceive the contingency of the present, thereby opening a space in which a new, and just, ordering might be imagined. Under the present conditions of multiple and deepening environmental crises, each marked by significant injustices, the generative and disruptive power of the aesthetic to range beyond the operations of extant legal practice is something which Palmer’s important study might have usefully contemplated.
