Abstract

Through a review of Sara Ramshaw’s, Justice as Improvisation, the essay evaluates recent scholarly directions in the interdisciplinary field of law and music. The essay considers both methodological and epistemological questions motivating this scholarship, and argues that there yet remains the opportunity to pursue with even greater specificity the meaning of music, in terms of its own vocabulary and genre. The new field of law and music is slowly but surely combining these formal considerations with an ever richer vocabulary, and a richer inter-disciplinary dialogue not just about jazz but with it. What might have been a somewhat sterile exercise in virtuosity is turning into a fully-fledged interdisciplinary claim, with its own methodology and its own epistemology, capable of illuminating not just law or music, but both in light of the other.