Law, Music and Semiotics

Music and Law is part of the broader field of Law and the Humanities, and shares common attributes with Law and Literature and Poetry and Law. All three comprise alternative articulations and critiques of the legal culture, yet music is one of the few objects with the capacity to directly impact behaviour and mental state, whether knowingly or unconsciously. Songs are often credited with providing ‘the soundtrack of our lives’ and as an object in the world, as an object of study, or within an interdisciplinary context, music animates social relatedness, and this is one of its principal functions. Listening to music can alert the sensibilities to a multiplicity of dissident perspectives and sensuous content from which to inform personal life choices and, importantly, awaken the capacity for compassion and moral judgement. Accordingly, the ensuing aural free play of the imagination can radically transform individual and collective thoughts and feelings about important moral and legal questions, such as the visible and invisible consequences of regulation, and the role of justice in relation to otherness, inclusion, and exclusion. This chapter explores the complex intertwining of these two distinct yet analogous disciplinary fields, law and music, in the context of propositions that (1) law is an art as much as a science; (2) all human life needs rhythm and harmony; and (3) an imagination is an essential legal apparatus. In a similar vein, and in response to a query on how to prepare for a successful career in law, US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter famously advised “no less important for a lawyer is the cultivation of the imaginative faculties by reading poetry, seeing great paintings ... and listening to great music”.