The practice of law today is adapting to new cultural and technological conditions. In an era when most people receive news, entertainment, and stories about the world from television and the Internet, lawyers are learning to draw on a similarly visual rhetoric for effective communication.

 

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).

 

Each of these windows onto the practice, theory, and teaching of law in contemporary society informs the other. Traveling through one portal into another makes vivid the interpenetration of law and popular culture.

 

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 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).

 

For more information about Prof. Sherwin's work, visit: keynote lecture, University of Alabama Law School ("Law's Screen Life"); CKUT (Montreal); McGill radio interview (on the need for visual literacy for lawyers, judges, and jurors); StayFree magazine interview; C-SPAN (discussing his book, When Law Goes Pop [University of Chicago Press 2000]); The Today Show (on televising capital punishment); "On Being Among Friends"; "Celebrity Lawyers and the Cult of Personality", "Law, Metaphysics, and the New Iconoclasm."