The Visual in Law: Some Problems for Legal Theory

Abstract

Digital visual displays construct legal knowledge in new ways and reconstitute our notions of community both inside and outside of law. This article describes three problems that the proliferation of visuals poses for legal theory. The first concerns how to subsume the flood of images in court within a jurisprudence of words. The second probes how some visuals induce belief by seeming to combine access to the real with the allure of dreams. The third asks us to rethink what legal judgment may borrow from popular visual culture while still yielding acceptable justice. Each dimension of legal visuality creates tensions in our conceptions of what law and legal knowledge should be.

Keywords: visual evidence, digital media, jurisprudence, law and psychology, theory, psychology of evidence, sociology of knowledge