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

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice, teaching, and theory of law. What happens to law when it takes on the life of an image on the screen? This question is no idle speculation. Law today lives in images the way images live on the screen. Not simply law's visual presence in popular culture ' on television, in movies, and even in interactive virtual worlds online, like Second Life. Law also lives in images inside the courtroom. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument, as a proliferation of official (and amateur) surveillance footage, video documentaries, and digital re-enactments has changed the way trials proceed worldwide. From the competing documentary footage that played at during the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to the victim impact videos that play out ' with musical scores included ' in capital cases throughout the US, the search for truth and justice inside the courtroom has become an offshoot of visual meaning making. But what is real, and what is simulation? Might it be that we are living in a baroque dream, a contingent world, like an all too vivid video game, that opens onto endless others? It is no accident that the Wachowski brothers' film, The Matrix, struck a nerve worldwide. Without justice, laws endlessly proliferate within a field of uncertainty and longing; and, left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law's claim to power. To meet this crisis, Law, Ethics and the Digital Baroque offers a cultural diagnostic identifying the contemporary conditions in which law lives as a digital image on the screen; arguing for a post-positivist jurisprudential paradigm that is adequate to the challenge these conditions present.