Head

Prof. Dr. Christoph Möllers, LL.M.

Research Associates

Dr. Sabine Müller-Mall / Sandra Schnädelbach, M.A.

Student Assistants

Anja Breljak / Jan-Philipp Kruse

Objective

The project aims at analyzing different elements of the form of adjudication: sensual perception, rule-application, fact-description and the claim to normativity. The specific form assigned to these elements shall be placed within the context of aesthetic theory to analyze the similarities and differences between aesthetic judgment and adjudication.The closeness between aesthetic judgment and adjudication has been noted in jurisprudential discourse since Kant but was never systematically examined in a comparative-theoretical perspective. Even so, it is essentially undisputed in jurisprudential discourse that adjudication cannot be reduced to syllogistic rule-application because there often are no rules to apply and because “application” constitutes a category that includes cognitive and normative elements. The two subprojects will not only uncover the latent and manifest aesthetic elements of adjudication they could also show that adjudication is a form that constitutes law’s object. It follows – e contrario – that it is not sufficient only to analyze the forensic elements of aesthetic judgment (e.g., advocacy reference to a work, rhetoric of the intentional in reference to an artist etc.); it is also necessary to examine how court judgments constitute the object. The claim here is not that law and art are congruent; the aim is to unmask the interconnected claims to validity and to description present in both forms of judgment as world constitutive and cognitive processes.

Subproject 1: The object of adjudication and of the non-evaluative

(Professor Christoph Möllers, Sandra Schnädelbach, M.A.)

This subproject examines the judgment immanent determination of the dispute and, hence, the object of adjudication in legal procedures. How should the determination of the dispute be theorized? How and when do we know the object of adjudication? Specifically, the act of adjudication shall be spelled out into the act of fiction, i.e., the unrealization of the real and the realization of imagination: Real acts are transformed into disputes of adjudication and introduced into the fictitious meaning space of the law. This perspective reveals a reflexive relationship between dispute and adjudication that raises the methodological issue of whether the analysis of the dispute actually informs the category of adjudication or whether it is necessary to analyze the adjudication immanent perception as it relates to the dispute. This raises the comparative issue of the role for aesthetic judgments of the relationship between fiction and reality in art.

Subproject 2: Normative perceptions in adjudication

(Professor Christoph Möllers, Dr. Sabine Müller-Mall)

Savigny’s claim that performing legal reasoning principally generates the generality of legal adjudication shall be analyzed more thoroughly in the context of this subproject as a phenomenon of normative perception. The legal rules of adjudication and of the dispute are appreciated in the context of legal procedures. Focus of this subproject is the distinction between descriptive and normative perceptions. Norm creation in adjudication and cognitive reference points are closely intertwined with the latter constituting the basis for the appropriateness of adjudication itself. The categorization of the notion of adjudication therefore requires the analysis of both of these aspects from this angle. In the discourses analyzed by the collaborative research center (SFB), notions of aesthetic experience as a process phenomenon are rediscovered in the analysis of normative perceptions in adjudication. Describing the positioning of normative perceptions in adjudication could allow us to draw conclusions regarding the relationship between aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments as a category.