Beauty, Truth and the Common Law Judgment

Traditionally the concept of the beaux arts has excluded rational activities such as law. However, the contemporary discipline of aesthetics is satisfied to admit that practical activities come within its remit—or perhaps ‘admit anew’, for our more distant ancestors did not see art and reason as occupying separate spaces but sought instead to intellectualise and rationalise beauty in a manner that comprised the scholarly and scientific. Drawing on Kant and other observers on art and aesthetics, this article considers the common law judgment as an aesthetic object and examines some of the logical consequences that arise from viewing it so. More particularly, the article considers such issues as beauty and/in the common law judgment, the relationship between the common law judgment and truth, the operation of image and imagination in the common law judgment, the aesthetics of form in the context of legal judgment-writing, the imagined judgment, and the notions of emotion and truth. Arising from this analysis a series of logical propositions are then posited as presenting when one conceives of and approaches the common law judgment as an aesthetic form.