VISUAL PERSUASION IN THE LAW (3) (JLH300)

Professor Richard Sherwin, Christina Spiesel

Increasingly, images, and not words alone, are crucial to persuasion in politics, advertising, and other domains, including law. Successful lawyers must understand and deploy visual language in addition to more traditional means of legal analysis and communication. Students learn how to develop a theory of the case--a story that persuades not only legally but culturally, not only rationally but emotionally--by expanding and strategically choosing from the toolkit of persuasive techniques available at each stage of a particular legal controversy. Students construct both verbal (textual and oral) and visual arguments about issues raised in actual litigation. The major projects include creating a visual display for use as demonstrative evidence at trial, and as a final assignment, a video for use in closing argument. This course is designed to work on many levels simultaneously. First (modifying McLuhan), we explore how medium and message continuously interact and affect each other in legal communication and advocacy. Second, we examine those interactions using sources drawn from many disciplines. Third, we study particular source materials both as data for the arguments we make and as an illustration of visual rhetoric. Fourth, we observe the constant interplay of the course subject matter and how we teach and learn it: for instance, what we learn about verbal rhetoric and visual intelligence should help us to engage in effective legal advocacy. Enrollment limited.