Richard K. Sherwin

A Matter of Voice and Plot: Belief and Suspicion in Legal Storytelling

In this article I attempt to show that an enhanced awareness of the rhetorical perspective toward law is a good thing for the legal culture. Indeed, I contend that its affirmation of the interpretive process provides a secure point of departure for legal discourse and debate among legal scholars, decision makers, and practitioners. However, while the affirmative message that this perspective brings may be desirable (at least to those who remain committed to the project of liberalism), there is reason yet to be wary. Providing a clearer understanding of the caveat that must accompany the rhetorical (or interpretive) turn in the legal culture is one of the goals this article seeks to achieve.

Law, culture and visual studies

This reference work:- Provides the only available comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics- Highlights the interdisciplinary nature of legal visual semiotics- Fills the gap between law, semiotics and visualityThe proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward.

What Is Visual Knowledge, and What Is It Good For? Potential Ethnographic Lessons from the Field of Legal Practice

A firm basis exists for an instructive exchange between anthropologists and legal scholars regarding the production, dissemination, and interpretation of visual meaning in this digital era. The practice and theory of law and anthropology today are increasingly being shaped and informed by what appears on electronic screens—in the field, the workplace, and inside the classroom. Practicing lawyers and ethnographers need new tools of analysis and representation to meet the intellectual and aesthetic demands of digital visual rhetoric. This article offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the visual meaning-making process on the open source borderland between disciplinary expertise and pop cultural communication.

Too Late for Thinking: The Curious Quest for Emancipatory Potential in Meaningless Affect and Some Jurisprudential Implications

The “affective turn” presents a number of important challenges to law and the humanities. One such challenge concerns our ability to resist the temptation to romanticize the inhuman. Theorists from Nietzsche to Massumi have been so taken by the emancipatory promise of affective intensity that they risk relinquishing responsibility for freedom’s necessary social, political, and legal pre-conditions. Our responsibility for narrative construction and narrative choice carries with it an ethical imperative to understand the orchestration of affect. Downplaying the importance of reflective consciousness (including our capacity for prudent judgment) in favor of spontaneous affective events threatens to rob freedom of its meaning and open democratic societies to grave risks.

Law’s Life on the Screen

Law today lives in images the way images live on the screen. Visualizing law in real cases — through visual evidence and visual argument — is now becoming an increasingly routine part of legal practice in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Viewers are used to being moved, edified and delighted (and at times titillated or even horrified) by what they see and hear on electronic screens both large and small. But what are the implications when the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom depends upon those very responses? What does it mean for our system of law when the emotions we feel, or the sheer aesthetic delight, or the memories that are evoked, or the fantasies and desires that are activated by visual images become the motive force underlying legal judgment?

What screen do you have in mind? Contesting the visual context of law and film studies

Law on the screen gives rise to a distinct way of doing jurisprudence. In this sense, it is incumbent upon legal scholars to discern with great care the kind of reality and the way of being that cinematic and electronic screens invite us to assume. Jurisprudence theorizes law in accordance with the cultural and cognitive meaning making tools at its disposal: story frames, character types, social scenarios, metaphors, as well as cultural and socially embedded or constructed emotional patterns, among other narratival and purely sensational elements. Law and film studies thus may be viewed as encompassing a larger concern with mind and culture. It addresses how a specific set of communication tools in a given socio-legal context polices the production, maintenance, and suppression of meaning and discrete meaning making practices. This aspect of the field implicates a rich agenda for empirical research. And by showing how it is done - how the manifold ways of habituated meaning making produce, preserve, and exclude possible worlds as well as ways of being (seeing/experiencing) - visual legal studies may also help to clear a path toward creative reconstruction. In this respect, law on the screen scholarship invites an empirical as well as an emancipatory practice, a source of knowledge as well as a call to action against false necessity.

Law and the myth of the self in mass media representations

In the story/counter-story dynamic of criminal trials, trial lawyers need to keep two meaning making strategies in mind: 1) the strategy of narrative seduction, and 2) the strategy of disbelief.

Law, Violence, and Illiberal Belief

These are troubled times for liberal belief. Caught between the pressures of post-modernist deconstruction on the one side and pre-modernist fundamentalism on the other, the liberal project is now being squeezed as it has never been squeezed before.