Sentences Matter: Law and the Typographic Imaginary

Bringing together jurisliterature – the literary genre of legal judgment – and the typographic imaginary of early printed books, this paper engages the entangled material-literary quality of judicial sentencing. In this understanding ‘sentencing’ is not merely the allocation of punishment to criminals, but a general practice of ‘mattering’ the law in typographic form. The terminology of ‘mattering’ highlights both the material quality of law and the significance of this materiality, following insights from new materialism. In short, sentences matter (to) legality. The sentencing of the law is a typographic performance that expresses unwritten legality in sensible form, staging legal authority for reading subjects that are concomitantly caught within the material-literary forms of written judgments. Refocusing on legal pages to take in the entangled matterings of their sentences reveals not the closing down of meaning typical of dogmatic law, but the space-time-material conditions for a creative opening up towards justice.