Legal Commentary

Sometimes people say that a simple theory is an elegant theory.  Or one might hear that a theory is beautiful in its simplicity.  That might mean that a simple theory is an effective theory, and that in turn could have two other meanings: (1) the theory's simplicity will allow more people to understand it in the first place; and/or (2) the theory's simplicity will mean that people who understand it and find it appealing are most likely to apply it correctly (or as intended).  Both of these meanings really have to do with the theory's influence, or its expediency, or the capacity of the theory to reach desirable results: if you want your theory to be influential, to be useable, to be applied as you intend and to reach the consequences for which you intend it, it's wise to make your theory as simple as possible.

But I take the prejudice in favor of simplicity sometimes to mean something more than an argument from effectiveness.  The equation of simplicity with elegance seems to be an aesthetic claim as well -- that simple theories are beautiful, elegant, artful, and that theories become uglier or progressively inelegant as they become more complex and ornamented.  In legal theory, in the fields with which I am familiar, simplicity is often seen as an intrinsic virtue, and its virtue seems somehow fundamentally connected to an aesthetic sensibility.  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, please, not Bernini.   

I may be quite wrong about the impressions above, but having these thoughts suggests another set of questions that I'm hopeful the learned readership here will know something about.  First, has there been any scholarship on the relationship between legal theory and aesthetics -- how and why it is that we find one kind or genre of legal theoretical account more appealing, from an aesthetic point of view, than another?  Second, and more generally, what does the scholarly landscape of law and aesthetics look like?  Has anyone thought about, for example, Roger Scruton's work in aesthetics in the context of legal scholarship?  Are there any connections between aesthetics and IP law (I could have selected other fields, but this one seems like it might offer something particularly interesting)?  I suppose the law and literature movement may have explored the aesthetics of opinion-writing, and perhaps there are other connections that have been probed there as well.  Is there a future for law and aesthetics (or not), and if so, in what might it consist?