Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice and theory of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom 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. Law as image also shares broader cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. When fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law’s claim to power. Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers a jurisprudential paradigm that is equal to the challenge that current cultural conditions present.
Richard K. Sherwin is Professor of Law and Director of the Visual Persuasion Project at New York Law School. He is the author of When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture (Chicago: 2000, 2002), and is the editor and a contributor to Popular Culture and Law (Ashgate: 2006) and Law, Culture, and Visual Studies, (with Anne Wagner) two volumes (Springer: 2013).
In 2005, Professor Sherwin launched the Visual Persuasion Project (nyls.edu/centers/projects/visual_persuasion). The project seeks to promote a better understanding of the practice, theory, and teaching of law through the cultivation of critical visual intelligence. The website showcases "best practices" in visual persuasion inside the courtroom through a broad range of visual products, from 2-D and 3-D animations to accident reenactments, day-in-the-life documentaries, settlement brochures, montages, and other innovative visual products.
A frequent public speaker both in the United States and abroad, Professor Sherwin is a regular commentator for television, radio, and print media on the relationship between law, culture, film, and digital media. His appearances include NBC's Today Show, WNET, National Public Radio, RTE Radio 1 (National Public Radio in Ireland) and CKUT (Montreal, Canada).
