The “Life” in the Living Law: Law, Emotion and Landscape

Abstract

This article explores the concept of living law from spatio-temporal and emotional approach. Understood as a dynamic interplay process, living law basically carries a collective emotional-legal landscape aspect in it, in which three aspects of law, emotion, and landscape are shaping and being reproduced. Based on the semantic findings in decency-related court decisions, this article argues that sensing the living law is to be understood as seeing the physical legal landscape, believing the emotional common sense, and anticipating guided by communitarian atmosphere. The (legal) daily experiences captured in the case-laws are essentially assemblages of various meanings and spaces tied up homogeneously in an ideologically manner. Through this examination, living law will look increasingly more complex, unstable, and non-linear, especially in terms of its performativity – which on the one hand law constitutes negative impacts on vulnerable groups, and on the other hand, it has the potential to facilitate social transformation.