A Walk Through the Gardens of Law. Hypertexts, Transcience, and Transjuridicity

A garden is, first and foremost, the result of a personal pleasure. Unlike an herbarium or an orchard, whose purposes are pragmatic—to feed the body—, the main reason for a garden to exist is the aesthetic, sensory, mystical, or intellectual pleasure—to feed the soul. Not by chance, its etymology goes back to the Latin gardinus, whose root produced Garten (in German), giardino (in Italian), jardin (in French), and jardim (in Portuguese). That very root also resulted in regarder (to look, in French) and guardare (to look, in Italian). Thus, it is legitimate to think that the garden is, above all, something to be looked at and felt. In addition to his own pleasure, the gardener seeks, with his languages, plans and tools, to seduce, convince, bewitch those who pass through his garden. Unlike a grove or a forest, the garden is never a giveaway; it is always planned, built, cultivated. As the result of a cultural intervention, a garden always has an authorship. The garden requires careful and continuous work, the steps of which include defining a project, preparing the land, picking and purchasing the seedlings and seeds, defining a theme and style for the garden, pruning and watering it. There is no garden without this two-fold care: the attentive detail, the microdimension of choosing the best flowers or bees, but also the Herculean physical effort, extensive plowing, the macrodimension of harmony and its multiple relationships. The garden is also marked by delimitation: spaces, species, waters, flowerbeds, mainly, by demarcating and identifying its margins. A garden is always something closed, defined or delimited, even if it has no fences or walls. In the garden, the French concept of clôture is essential, unlike the forest, which gradually fades away, without a single and explicit end. But delimitation does not mean isolation: a garden dialogues with the terroir, birds, insects, always implying permeability and interaction with time and space. From the garden of Eden or the hanging gardens of Babylon, to the gardens of Academus and Epicurus, to the multicolored landscaping of Burle Marx, or the submerged landscaping of Takashi Amano, this dialogue with time and space has allowed (and continues to authorize) the existence of a multitude of memorable gardens. Gardens and law share many points in common. The gardens and their labyrinths are recurrent themes in the literary universe of the Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges. Based on this metaphorical-literary framework, an attempt will be made to develop a cartography of the paths of legal complexity, trying to answer the following question: If law were a garden, what kind of garden would it be today, given its current complexity? To answer this question, the essay establishes hyperlinks among law, science, art and literature, through the use of the concepts of “Transcience” and “Transjuridicity”, innovative methodologies that build bridges of dialogue between the legal and the non-legal realm in order to better understand complexity.