Edited by David Howes

2019

This special issue, by charting the sensory turn in law and legal studies, is of a piece with the “sensorial revolution” in the humanities and social sciences generally that, beginning in the 1990s, has challenged the monopoly that the discipline of psychology formerly exercised over the study of the senses and sense perception. This work has revealed the extent to which the sensorium is a social formation. Perception does not just go on in some grotto in the head: it is a cultural as well as psychological process, which means it is public and not merely private and subjective, as is commonly thought. For this reason, it is appropriate to inquire into the legalization of sensation – that is, into all the ways in which law is implicated in the governance of the sensuous. The articles range over such topics as the law of bad smells, the politics of noise regulation, the trademarking of sensations, the resiliency of business handshakes in pandemic culture, silence in the court, drone warfare as sensory anaesthesia, and Cold war nuclear imperialism in the Pacific islands.