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This paper examines the role of performance in law and music as a
structural means of their self-programming construction. Music and law are considered
as parallel social practices or performative doings. The paper begins with a
critical analysis of the special aesthetical features of present-day juridical practice as
exemplified by legal trial and legal expertise. Drawing upon reflections on the
modern discourse on aesthetics and art, the article then examines in greater detail
the specific traits of performance in law and jazz music. Performative processes
move from representation to presentation, from a preoccupation with rules and
controlling to induced self-programming. Both law and jazz regard the unknown
future as a resource for present decisions by ‘‘inventing’’ new possibilities; both
require, expand and promote a responsibility that does not follow from statutes nor
can be expressed in a code of ethics. Finally, the article addresses the performance
situation in jazz. Jazz being polyphonic and improvisational by nature, improvisation
makes explicit tradition by staging the context dependency of its performance.
It is mediated by the knowledge, the operational history and the communication of
the participants. Jazz is an exercise in the possibilities of an ‘‘aesthetics of imperfection’’
which can open up new ways of seeing law and politics.