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

273 Pages·2011·6.32 MB·English

by  Richard K Sherwin

Visualizing Law
in the Age of the
Digital Baroque
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 fi eld 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.
Richard K. Sherwin is Professor of Law and Director of the Visual Persuasion
Project at New York Law School, and author of When Law Goes Pop: the
Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture . His research includes law and
culture studies, law and fi lm, law and humanities, rhetorical studies, visual liti-
gation and litigation public relations.
Discourses of Law
Series editors: Peter Goodrich, Michel Rosenfeld and Arthur Jacobson
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
T his successful and exciting series seeks to publish the most innovative
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The impetus for the series came from the paradoxical merger and
confrontation of East and West. Globalization and the internationalization
of the rule of law have had dramatic and often unforeseen and ironic conse-
quences. An understanding of differing legal cultures, particularly different
patterns of legal thought, can contribute, often strongly and starkly, to an
appreciation if not always a resolution of international legal disputes. The
rule of law is tied to social and philosophical underpinnings that the series
seeks to excoriate and illuminate.
Titles in the series :
Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws
Edited by Peter Goodrich and Mariana Valverde
Law, Orientalism, and Postcolonialism: The Jurisdiction of the Lotus Eaters
Piyel Haldar
Endowed: Regulating the Male Sexed Body
Michael Thomson
The Identity of the Constitutional Subject: Selfhood, Citizenship, Culture,
and Community
Michel Rosenfeld
The Land is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with Indigenous
Jurisprudence
C. F. Black
Shakespearean Genealogies of Power: A Whispering of Nothing in Hamlet,
Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, a nd The
Winter’s Tale
Anselm Haverkamp
Forthcoming :
Novel Judgments: Legal Theory as Fiction
William Macneil
Crime Scenes: Forensics and Aesthetics
Rebecca Scott Bray
Sex, Culpability and the Defence of Provocation
Danielle Tyson
The Rule of Reason in European Constitutionalism and Citizenship
Yuri Borgmann-Prebil
T he publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Jacob Burns
Institute for Advanced Legal Studies of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of
Law to the seriesDiscourses of Law.
Visualizing Law
in the Age of the
Digital Baroque
Arabesques and Entanglements
Richard K. Sherwin
First published 2011
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2011 Richard K. Sherwin
The right of Richard K. Sherwin to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sherwin, Richard K.
Visualizing law in the age of the digital baroque : arabesques and
entanglements/Richard K. Sherwin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Law—Philosophy. I. Title.
K230.S535A38 2011
340ʹ.1—dc22
2010048526
ISBN: 978–0–415–61290–6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–415–61293–7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–81586–1 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion
by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction 1
2 Visual Jurisprudence: The New Paradigm 13
3 Law’s Screen Life: Visualizing Law in Practice 56
4 Images Run Riot: Law on the Landscape of the Neo-Baroque 83
5 Theorizing the Visual Sublime: Law’s Legitimation Reconsidered 119
6 The Digital Challenge: Command and Control Culture and
the Ethical Sublime 150
7 Conclusion: Visualizing Law’s Rhetorical Ideal 173
Notes 193
Bibliography 234
Index 251
vii
To my parents, Erma and Stanley Sherwin
List of Illustrations
2.1 The Ambassadors , Hans Holbein the
Younger (1533) between pp. 118–119
2.2 The Matrix (1999). Dir.: Andy and Larry
Wachowski between pp. 118–119
2.3 Venus with a Mirror , Titian ( c. 1555) between pp. 118–119
3.1 From the prosecutor’s closing argument in the
Michael Skakel murder trial 75
3.2 From the prosecutor’s closing argument in the
Michael Skakel murder trial 76
4.1 Mulholland Drive (2001). Laura Harring.
Dir.: David Lynch between pp. 118–119
5.1 The Temptation of St Anthony (1577),
Tintoretto between pp. 118–119
5.2 Danae (1544–1546), Titian between pp. 118–119
5.3 Tarquin and Lucretia (1578/80), Tintoretto 140
5.4 The Letter Writer (1665), Vermeer 143
5.5 A Maid Asleep (1656/1667), Vermeer between pp. 118–119
6.1 Green Disaster Ten Times (1963), Andy Warhol 159
6.2 Las Meniñas (1656), Velázquez between pp. 118–119
ix
Acknowledgements
During the years of this book’s gestation, I have benefi ted from the generosity
of numerous friends and colleagues. It gives me great pleasure to acknow-
ledge in particular Peter Goodrich, Austin Sarat, Jennifer Deger, Marie Rudden,
Dani Celemajeur, Alison Young, Peter Rush, Andrew Kenyon, Amy Adler,
James Elkins, Richard Schechner, Desmond Manderson, Francis Mootz, Frank
Munger, Michael Perlin, David Johnson, Beth Noveck, Dan Hunter and James
Grimmelmann. I am very grateful to Laura Marks for sharing some of her
extremely interesting work on enfoldment and infi nity prior to its publication.
Needless to say, what I have made of others’ efforts in my behalf remains my
responsibility alone. I also wish to express my thanks to Dean Richard Matasar
of New York Law School for his intellectual and material support over the
years. Nicholas Tambone, NYLS class of ’12, provided fi rst-rate assistance in
the fi nal stages of the book’s preparation. Naomi Allen and Alexzia Plummer
provided all manner of technical assistance, for which I am also most grateful.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my children, David and Ellie, and to my wife
Gilda for their unwavering support and their sustaining love.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 has been published as “Law’s Screen
Life” in A. Sarat (ed.) Imagining Legality , Tuscaloosa, AL: 2011; Chapter 4 is
adapted from an earlier version that appeared in L aw on the Screen , edited by
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey © 2005 by the
Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr University, all rights reserved; by
permission of the publisher, www.sup.org.
x