This introduction explains the title of this special issue as a call for transdisciplinary and culturally-oriented research on law in Germany. In an initial overview of pluralism, the text asserts that a German discussion of the pluralistic nature of legal authority predates the twentieth-century one within legal anthropology, legal theory, and political philosophy. The first part of the text reviews the early discussion of legal pluralism in the context of debates about state formation and an appropriate balance of forms of normative authority. This discussion points to the inherent plurality and affectivity of law. The second part of the introduction, in turn, is devoted to an argument in favor of the culturally-embedded and - mediated nature of legal phenomena made through an analysis of images relating to the so-called refugee crisis. On the basis of this analysis, it is posited that critical cultural methods and concepts are needed to comprehend current processes such as the so-called Europeanization of law, the increasing heterogeneity of legal systems and cultures, and to critically bracket the idea of “legal culture” in and of itself. The last part of the introduction offers an overview of the essays in this special issue. On the one hand, each essay contributes to the thesis that law is pluralistic and has to be investigated interdisciplinarily, using a plurality of methods. On the other hand, all of the contributions make a different kind of claim for how law transpires and is transported through theatrical, visual means, narratives, and affects.

This Article questions in what sense law in the German tradition has been—and can still be—considered a form of culture. The Article offers an overview of traditional approaches to law and culture in German Legal Theory and the Theory of Methods, and argues that the law has shifted from being perceived as culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to being in contrast with culture, which is considered the “other” of the law. Mediated by “legal culture,” the discourse pendulum has swung back to the notion of “Law as Culture” during the last three decades. Thomas Gutmann, the German lawyer, has fiercely challenged equating law with culture, describing it as “murky” and irrelevant. Similarly, the concept of “Law as Culture” is questioned by the provocations of “Law and Affect.” This Article claims that, irrespective of conceptual framework trends, applying the law remains a highly challenging cultural practice in terms of both fact-finding and interpreting legal norms.

“The headscarf case” is more than just a case. Talking law is often talking cases, but we need to understand law more specifically as a powerful practice of regulation. Law is also not only another discourse, or just text, or politics, with fundamental rights as “an issue,” or a promise, or just an idea. Instead, to protect fundamental rights, it is necessary to understand how in reacting to a conflict, we in fact speak rights today—Rechtsprechung—as a form of practice. The German Federal Constitutional Court's decision in the conflict about female teachers wearing headscarves in German public schools may be used to illustrate the pluralities of law—understood here as legal pluralism. This pluralism includes actors and legal arguments as frames to the speaking of law. In addition, it becomes clear that any analytical focus on gender, based on the current state of the art, further illuminates these issues. As such, interdisciplinary legal studies become inherently critical to the protection of fundamental rights.

This Article evaluates the merits and problems of comparative constitutional law as an interpretive means by the courts. It pleas for a nuanced perspective towards both agents and methods of comparative constitutional law. The Article is in favor of the use of comparative constitutional law by the courts. However, challenges as to the legitimation of comparison in court, functional limits of comparative constitutional law in the judiciary, and methodological questions remain to be solved. As far as constitutional and supreme courts are concerned, this Article argues that arguments derived from comparison should be regarded as a means of persuasive reasoning.

As a normative social practice, law mediates between the “is” and the “ought,” between prescription and description. Obviously, narratives and narration play a role in law when it comes to describing facts and events: The testimony of a witness in court, the presentation of the case in a judgment, or (semi-)fictional cases used for legal education spring to mind. In this Article, however, the focus is on the prescriptive side of law. If, in line with the definition given by Matías Martínez and Michael Scheffel, a narrative is to be understood as a “sequence of events and actions producing at the level of [literary] action an autonomous structure of meaning,” it becomes possible to identify narratives and narrative elements within legal norms and provisions. The first part of this paper will deal with grand historical —or historicizing—narratives and cast some light on how they are used to give sense and direction to the interpretation and application of, especially, constitutional principles. The second part will suggest a narratological perspective on statutory law and attempt to reconstruct the process of norm application. This Article argues that this process relies mainly on comparative methods, and that narratives mediate between the seemingly opposed spheres of law and fact. Both kinds of narratives, the grands récits of constitutional law and the petits récits of statutory law, though quite different at first sight, possess common traits. They both fit the definition of narrative just cited; they both result from a process of selection and are thus prone to exclusionary effects. Moreover, the grand narratives of constitutional law also affect statutory law, its interpretation, and its application.

Benjamin Cardozo, a great promoter of the concept of the unity of form and content in law and literature, once wrote that “[t]he perplexity of judges becomes the scholar's opportunity.” Cardozo's observation prompts my contribution on narratives in the law to this special issue on pluralities in the law because of the interrelation between law in academic theory and law in practice. My experience as a judge and an academic working in both the fields of law and literature, and law and humanities, allows me to provide a unique point of view. This Article argues the following: First, “to narrate is already to explain” as Paul Ricoeur wrote; the way in which the facts of a case are narrated largely determines the outcome of that case, therefore jurists need to develop and cherish narrative knowledge. Second, jurists should be imaginative about both the law and the people whose fates they determine when they use language to translate brute facts into the reality of the legal narrative. Third, this Article investigates and critically responds to literary theorists' various views on narrative and narratology, explaining which elements can be fruitfully incorporated into a legal narratology. I argue that jurists, while acting as authors and readers of legal narratives, all too often disregard what literary theory and the humanities more generally have to offer to legal practice, which is to highlight points of misunderstanding in our interdisciplinary literary-legal discussions. Here, too, scholarly opportunities remain to be seized for further clarification and theoretical elaboration of the bond of law and narrative.

The 800th anniversary of Magna Carta offers a study in how the foundations of law have been visualized in the United Kingdom. The fact that the British sense of identity as a free nation has historically been based on its commitment to “unwritten” law means that it lacks a foundational text and has hence traditionally figured the law through a plurality of images without a core. The absence of a singular image on which to focus national identity became acute in the early twenty-first century as the multiplication of sources of legality and justice in a globalized and multicultural world put pressure on the United Kingdom's sense of sovereignty. The tensions manifest in this crisis can be seen across a range of images produced for the anniversary, each bearing different values. Yet the rival narratives are able to coexist in the same commemorative space, their differences subsumed within Magna Carta's status as a postmodern “icon,” the consecration of the reciprocal identification between the protection of liberty and the rule of law. The Article concludes by examining a court battle over land on the borders of the commemorative site, and at another commissioned artwork. Both, in their different ways, bring into view the boundaries and bonds imposed by the rule of law that the iconic image elides.

In the present situation, law's Öffentlichkeit, or its principal “openness to the public,” needs to be distinguished from its being the object of publicity as dominated by modern media. Law's public openness has historically been dependent on, and determined by, two theatrical modes of appearance: The theatrical-proper and the dramatic. Paradoxically, in both cases the jurisdictional “openness to the public” works not only through forms of visibility but also forms of invisibility. These two theatrical modes—and their dynamic play with visibility and invisibility—have been portrayed in works of art that have influenced the way general audiences imagine the law to work. These works also correlate with the different histories and public appearances and openness of the European and the Anglo-American systems of law. Historically speaking, the European system has been more theatrically inclined, in the context of a distinctly imperial trajectory that has been dominated by the desire to stage the law and to follow correct procedure. The Anglo-American one, by contrast, is more dramatically inclined, and has followed a distinctly anti-imperial trajectory—whether anti-royal or anti-state—influenced by the desire to stage trials in which peers determine the dramatic outcome. Although both systems are basically open to the public, they both work via a dynamic of protective invisibility. Yet due to current developments, the elements of invisibility in both systems tend to predominate over the elements of visibility. This suggests that both systems are moving toward a form of legal closure that is averse to the original theatrical and dramatic appearance and openness of law.

Law needs a force; without its force, it would be nothing. This article proposes a conceptualization of the force of law as affective by examining the political aesthetics of “Forensic Architecture,” a project based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The novelty of Forensic Architecture's analytical approach arises, on the one hand, from its use of technologies of power that are otherwise employed by states and their military forces—thus reversing the direction of the surveillant gaze towards a disobedient practice of seeing and sensing. On the other hand, the notion of a “force field” operates as a particular critique of European border policy. The force of law appears to merge into, and at the same time emerge out of, a complex arrangement of technological devices, legal regulations, and human actions. This essay re-traces the political aesthetics of the “left-to-die-boat” case, where a boat filled with migrants was left without any assistance despite the legal regulation that obliges obliging seafarers to rescue anyone in distress in the Mediterranean Sea. Forensic Architecture's case-work unsettles human-centered “norms of representation” typically used in critical writings on the European Union (EU) border regime; instead, the law is demonstrated to be enfolded within an affective force field that operates with “touch” and “connectivity” and that allows us to see and sense the law in a newly pluralistic manner.