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In courtrooms, law offices, government agencies, and elsewhere, how truth and justice are represented and assessed is increasingly dependent on what appears on electronic screens. Lawyers are coming to realize that in order to be successful they must understand the tools of communication at their (and their adversaries') disposal, especially the visual and multimedia tools that digital technologies make available. Lawyers in the digital era must comprehend and master the effects of these visual tools on their audiences' perceptions, thoughts, and emotions. Advocates who do not adapt to these demands are going to be at a competitive disadvantage.

There are many visuals to explore on this site. Choose your own entry point and pathway: from top-flight visual litigation service providers (featuring best practices in visual persuasion inside the courtroom) to visual legal training (featuring new law teaching tools and methodologies in real and virtual classrooms) to law and popular culture studies (featuring new scholarly approaches to the interpenetration of law and pop culture) to recent media events (featuring current law-related developments in the visual mass media).

The goal of the Visual Persuasion Project is to promote a better understanding of the practice, theory, and teaching of law in the current screen-dominated, pervasively visual, digital era. The Project was formed in 2005 to study and advance the cultivation of critical visual intelligence, to inspire creative visualizations of evidence, case narratives, policy analysis, and legal argumentation, and to help lawyers, judges, law students, and the lay public integrate new visual tools into more traditional (textual and verbal) approaches to legal analysis.

This site is sponsored by New York Law School's Visual Persuasion Project (Professor Richard K. Sherwin, founder & director).

In a seminar called "Visual Persuasion in the Law," taught by Prof. Richard K. Sherwin at New York Law School, students learn how lawyers communicate in court and out using visual images on electronic screens. For their final projects, the students, working in small groups, create short films on a law-related topic.

Here is one such film from Fall 2012:

"Devil's Advocate: The Fight to Free Damien Echols" is a short film produced and directed by New York Law School students Anthony Iliakostas ('14), Meghan Lalonde ('13), and Ryan Morrison ('13). The film examines how Damien Echols, a member of the ‘West Memphis 3’, was wrongfully convicted of the murders of three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Featuring one-on-one interviews with Damien and his legal team, this film provides an inside look at the people responsible for Damien's freedom and the ongoing fight for ultimate exoneration through years of rallying support from the same entity that helped convict him in the first place: the media.