La on Display The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment [Hardcover]

Visual and multimedia digital technologies are transforming the practice of law: how lawyers construct and argue their cases, present evidence to juries, and communicate with each other. They are also changing how law is disseminated throughout and used by the general public. What are these technologies, how are they used and perceived in the courtroom and in wider culture, and how do they affect legal decision making?
In this comprehensive survey and analysis of how new visual technologies are transforming both the practice and culture of American law, Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel explain how, when, and why legal practice moved from a largely words-only environment to one more dependent on and driven by images, and how rapidly developing technologies have further accelerated this change. They discuss older visual technologies, such as videotape evidence, and then current and future uses of visual and multimedia digital technologies, including trial presentation software and interactive multimedia. They also describe how law itself is going online, in the form of virtual courts, cyberjuries, and more, and explore the implications of law’s movement to computer screens. Throughout Law on Display, the authors illustrate their analysis with examples from a wide range of actual trials.

Feigenson and Spiesel persuasively argue for a more critical and contextualizing approach to the growing flood of digital imagery in the courtroom. Given the enormous power of imagery to sway opinions and the innovative ways in which visuals can now be presented, judges, jurors, and especially lawyers are obligated to know how to interrogate these new forms of evidence and explication. Law on Display serves as a timely and comprehensive introduction to digital visual literacy in the legal system. This is a widely informed, wisely reasoned, accessible analysis of how, for good or for evil, digital visual technology is transforming the conduct of trials and the very lãq