This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). Today we begin with an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
Does imagination matter to legal reasoning? This is the question confronted in Artefacts of Legal Inquiry. Surprisingly, the question has not be asked, let alone answered, much before in legal scholarship. When it has been, it has often been approached through other categories, such as intuition or creativity, or as a moral virtue akin to empathy. What has not been examined is the importance of contemporary developments in the philosophy of imagination for theories of legal reasoning. It is this challenge that the book seeks to meet. It does so by also drawing on other fields that have a great deal to say about imagination: literary theory and history; and rhetorical theory and history. The book is thus an interdisciplinary investigation into the value of imagination for legal reasoning.
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