Law in the Digital Age: How Visual Communication Technologies are Transforming the Practice, Theory, and Teaching of Law

Law today has entered the digital age. The way law is practiced – how truth and justice are represented and assessed – is increasingly dependent on what appears on electronic screens in courtrooms, law offices, government agencies, and elsewhere. Practicing lawyers know this and are rapidly adapting to the new era of digital visual rhetoric. Legal theory and education, however, have yet to catch up. This article is the first systematic effort to theorize law\u27s transformation by new visual and multimedia technologies and to set out the changes in legal pedagogy that are needed to prepare law students for practice in the new environment. The article explores the consequences for legal theory and practice of the shift from an objectivist to a constructivist approach to human knowledge, using an expanded, multidisciplinary understanding of rhetoric to analyze the elusiveness of evidentiary truth and the nature and ethics of persuasion in the digital era

H. Gregg Lewis Memorial Comments

Economic

Law and the Myth of the Self in Mass Media Representations

In the story/counter-story dynamic of criminal trials, trial lawyers need to keep two meaning making strategies in mind: 1) the strategy of narrative seduction, and 2) the strategy of disbelief. An earlier version of this essay was presented in Toronto at the 1995 annual meeting of the Law & Society Association. This material is adapted from a larger work in progress on the relationship between law and popular culture

Law in the Flesh: Tracing Legitimation\u27s Origin to The Act of Killing?

A proper respect for civil order does not mandate the elision of political violence. To the contrary, civility requires that we explore the exercise of violence at the beginning of state sovereignty. To forget, or repress, originary violence invites its return. That is why, with its insistence upon rational calculation and the neutralization of desire, the vast cleanup operation of liberal theory is bound to fail