How Visual Evidence and Visual Storytelling Are Changing the Practice of Law
Channel: Cambridge Law Faculty
Date: 2016-08-23

Professor Richard K. Sherwin, Wallace Stevens Professor of Law, Dean for Faculty Scholarship, Director, The Visual Persuasion Project, New York Law School, spoke about 'Visual Literacy for Lawyers: How Visual Evidence and Visual Storytelling Are Changing the Practice of Law in the Digital Age' on 26 April 2016 as a guest of the Fitzwilliam College Law Society. 

In contemporary legal practice, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument both inside the courtroom and in the court of public opinion. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning making. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. In this presentation, I address what it means for jurists to develop a workable visual jurisprudence. I offer two different epistemological models for warranting visual belief. In one model, images serve as copies of an original; in the second model, images operate as event (as performative interaction rather than imitative fact). With this framework in place, we may begin to explore diverse criteria for visual credibility ranging from empirical measurements of truth as ‘correctness’ to the aesthetics of ‘delight’ and the experience of visual ‘presence’ (the visual sublime). 

For more information see: http://www.visualpersuasionproject.com/about-the-project/