Law Commons^™

Taking Images Seriously, Elizabeth G. Porter

Articles

Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises continue to evoke Blackstone and Kent; most legal casebooks are facsimiles of Langdell’s; and legal journals resemble the Harvard Law Review circa 1887. None of these influential forms of disseminating the law has embraced — or even nodded to — modern, image-saturated communication norms. Litigants, scholars and courts …