Expert Workshop: An Aesthetic Hermeneutics of the Law? Comparing Religious and Secular Approaches
6–7 May 2026
University of Bonn, IMPULSE – House for Intellectual Innovation and Creativity
Convenors:
Susanne Gössl, Institute of International Private Law and Comparative Law; Judith Hahn, Seminar of Canon Law; Klaus von Stosch, International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues, University of Bonn
Participants:
Ryszard Bobrowicz, University of Bonn; Annette M. Boeckler, University of Bonn; Ali-Reza Bhojani, University of Birmingham; Tobias Janz, University of Bonn; Hannelies Koloska, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, David C. Kraemer, Jewish Theological Seminary; Moshe Lavee, University of Haifa; Karin Raude, Aachen; Chaim Saiman, Villanova University; Dietmar von der Pfordten, University of Göttingen
About the workshop:
Recent research on legal aesthetics often proceeds from the observation that there is “no quid without quomodo”, that is to say that little may be said about the law without also considering the specific ways in which the law represents legal realities. Hence, it seems impossible to analyse legal content by abstracting it from its form. If we assume that form and content unite to constitute the law, this finding encourages the scholarly development of hermeneutic approaches to the law which, instead of methodically separating form and content, discover their dialectic relation. The expert workshop discusses the assumption that form and content of the law are intrinsically intertwined and examines what this implies for religious and secular legal traditions. It also asks what we can learn by studying the similar and different responses to legal content and legal form expressed by the different legal traditions. While it might seem self-evident that religious and secular legal traditions differ widely with regard to legal content, and it is also evident that they often differ with regard to how they present their legal material, it remains a matter of discussion whether they also differ essentially with regard to form. Do religious and secular traditions require different legal forms to represent what they understand as “law”? And what do different representations of the law tell us about the meaning of “law” in the respective traditions? With regard to Jewish law or Islamic law, it seems essential to study the aesthetics of the law by incorporating the study of its performativity, a view on the law which has also gained a foothold over the last couple of years in the study of secular legal traditions. Therefore we want to devote some attention to the question of whether and in what sense “doing law” has a similar function in the constitution of religious and secular law.
We want to discuss these questions within a comparative setting. To this end, we invite experts of religious law and secular law as well as scholars of comparative theology, philosophy of law, the arts, and historical studies to convene at the University of Bonn. The workshop is the first of its kind to bring together researchers with these diverse backgrounds to discuss ways in which an aesthetic approach to the law is helpful for gaining an understanding of the particular characteristic of legal orders. Fascinating research has been published over the past years on legal aesthetics. However, no project has yet addressed the question of whether aesthetic categories, such as narratives or form, play a different role in secular and religious legal traditions. Taking a comparative approach to exploring concepts and frameworks established in contemporary research on legal aesthetics, the workshop seeks to discover whether the scholarly response to aesthetic categories, such as legal forms, is a suitable approach for finding a more precise description of what elements religious and secular law do and do not have in common.
By creating radically interdisciplinary constellations, we want to encourage the participants’ creative responses to unfamiliar fields of scholarship in order to stimulate the emergence of new ideas. As an encounter between researchers who deal with norm and form in very diverse ways, this promises to generate some fundamental insights into the commonalities between the diverse legal traditions with regard to aesthetic categories, as well as into their differences. This not only enables us to better understand what legal traditions share, but also sheds some new light on the essentially contested question of what different traditions mean when they speak of the “law”.
The workshop is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Programme
Day 1: Wednesday, 6 May 2026
Welcome and Introduction
Session 1: How to Do Things with Law
Hannelies Koloska, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Riyāʾ and Ikhlāṣ, and the Aesthetics of Legal Performance in Early Islam
David C. Kraemer, Jewish Theological Seminary: The Declarative and the Discursive: Representation of Law and Process in Rabbinic Literature
Session 2: Norms, Forms, and the Arts
Karin Raude, Aachen: The Poetry of Law: Jacob Grimm’s Understanding of the Unity of Language and Law
Tobias Janz, University of Bonn: The Normativities of Musical Forms
Session 3: The Aesthetics of Authority
Ali-Reza Bhojani, University of Birmingham: Fallibility and Accountability: The Aesthetic Asymmetry of Authority in Modern Shiʿi Legal Theory
Ryszard Bobrowicz, University of Bonn: The Fashion of Authority
Day 2: Thursday, 7 May 2026
Session 4: Aesthetics of Law: Oral, Written, and Embodied
Moshe Lavee, University of Haifa: Golden Tongue: The Aesthetic Appreciation of the Mishnah and Talmud
Annette M. Boeckler, University of Bonn: Law as Liturgy
Session 5: Law as Form, Forms of Law
Dietmar von der Pfordten, University of Göttingen: Law as Mediation and its Means, especially its Form
Chaim Saiman, Villanova University: Form and Substance in Talmudic Adjudication
Conclusion & Farewell