Visual Legal Order: Rules, Images, Power

Most of the legal theories from the twentieth century have always asserted that rules are the result of linguistic utterances and that they have nothing to do with "visual culture”. The modern concept of “law” rules out every influence with visual elements and exclusively prefers the textual dimension: terms such as ‘rule’ and ‘law’ have always been put in a semantic relation with the terms ‘word’ and ‘text’. One need only recall the etymology of the Latin word "signum," which is the equivalent of the Greek word sema [, which precisely designates both images (signs, banners, paintings and sculptures, etc.) and watchwords (signals, commands, predictions, symptoms, etc.), to understand how deep the connections between the normative and visual spheres are. In these pages I will investigate some signs – not only rules, but also traces, images, material objects - which witness the relevance of the visual dimension in the construction of the legal discourse.