Name: Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements
Author: Richard K Sherwin (Author)
ISBN: 9780415612906

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements book cover

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements

Author(s): Richard K Sherwin (Author)

Publisher: Routledge
Publication Date: June 17, 2011
Language: English
Print length: 274 pages
ISBN-10: 041561290X
ISBN-13: 9780415612906

Book Description

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Sherwin is perhaps the world’s leading scholar of the visual life of law, and this masterful book advances a new perspective on the cultural life of law, what Sherwinn calls a “visual jurisprudence.” As Sherwin sees it, the very legitimacy of law in our era depends on the cultivation of visual literacy and an appreciation of the ethical and political dimensions of our visual experiences. Theoretically sohphisticated and lucidly argued this book is an example of interdisciplinary legal scholarship at its best.

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence, and Political Science, Amherst College.

Richard Sherwin’s Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque is an outstanding piece of thinking and writing. Sherwin is an apt historian of ideas, ranging authoritatively from the Bible to video games, from the Renaissance to Enlightenment philosophers, from the baroque to the ‘post-Foucauldian” epoch in which we now live. His project is spectacuarly successful. He develops a thesis that begins with law but utimately analyzes American society and culture in the 21st century. This is a wise as well as informed book that will find a wide audience among thos interested in cultural studies, law, and visual culture.

Richard Schechner, University Professor, Professor of Performance Studies, NYU

From the Inside Flap

Sherwin’s book is exceptionally inspiring, whether the reader shares Sherwin’s particular dream of the nature of justice or not the book inspires her to create a dream of her own. What more can you want from a book whose goal is to promote discussion on legal thinking? Visualizing law is also in itself an important, strongly emerging theme, deeply connected to the premises of legal thinking which still remain embedded in Cartesian influence. We need visual literacy and visual skills to become aware of our ways of thinking and to develop our ability to exploit visual means with awareness. Besides fascinating film analysis (Mulholland Drive by David Lynch) the book offers eyes opening analyses on films presented as evidence in court. –Soile Pohjanen, Aalto University

From the Back Cover

Sherwin’s book is a rich contribution to the emerging ﬁeld of visual legal studies
as it eloquently explores the visually constitutive relationships between law and
society… Sherwin invites us to scrutinize the reality of the virtual image as a source of justice.
Sarah Marusek, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

About the Author

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). 

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