Visual Law and Legal Design: Questions and Tentative Answers
This paper rests on three premises: First, ongoing digitalization is unleashing visualization (still or moving images) and audiovisualization (videos, audiovisual animations, etc.). This massive technological development is also initiating multisensorization (humanoid robots, virtual realities, etc). Second, visual law and legal design are still largely unknown as fields of scholarly inquiry to many legal and non-legal actors. My paper therefore uses “visual law” and “legal design” as working terms to delineate these fields. Third, I take an etymological approach to the word “responsible” featuring in the conference title of the International Symposion on Legal Informatics 2020 as it implies a quality that is required of digitalization. The English adjective “responsible” comes from the Latin verb respondēre, whose meanings include answering (responding) and corresponding to something. Based on these premises, this paper explores four key questions: How does current legal research respond to visualization? What are visual law and legal design? How are visual law and legal design similar or different? What should visual lawyers or legal designers do to act responsibly in the face of ongoing digitalization? Tackling these questions yields new insights for the debate on legal visualization. The answers given in this paper reveal how various basic legal disciplines and law-and areas gravitate around this topic. The answers also demonstrate that the insights of the basic legal disciplines and law-and areas are or should be interconnected. Taking such steps will promote not only visualization itself but also interdisciplinary legal research on this important topic.
Table of contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Legal Visualization: A Working Definition
- 3. Response of Legal Scholarship to Visualization
- 3.1. Response of doctrinal legal scholarship to visualization
- 3.2. Response of interdisciplinary legal scholarship to visualization
- 4. Visual Law
- 4.1. Subject matter
- 4.2. Subareas
- 4.2.1. Basic legal disciplines
- 4.2.1.1. Visual legal-historical studies and visual historical studies
- 4.2.1.1.1. Visual historical studies
- 4.2.1.1.2. Visual legal-historical studies
- 4.2.1.2. Visual legal theory
- 4.2.1.3. Visual sociology of law and visual sociology
- 4.2.1.3.1. Visual sociology
- 4.2.1.3.2. Images – Production and Products
- 4.2.1.3.3. Production
- 4.2.1.3.4. Products
- 4.2.1.3.5. Methods: “Doing Sociology Visually”
- 4.2.1.3.6. Production: Analyzing society visually
- 4.2.1.3.7. Products: Analyzing visual society
- 4.2.1.3.8. Theoretical approaches
- 4.2.1.3.9. Visual sociology of law
- 4.2.1.3.10. Images – Production and Products
- 4.2.1.3.11. Products
- 4.2.1.3.12. Methods
- 4.2.1.3.13. Theoretical approaches
- 4.2.2. Law-and areas
- 4.2.2.1. Law-and visual art
- 4.2.2.2. Law-and visual persuasion
- 4.2.2.3. Law-and visual culture
- 4.2.2.4. Law-and sight
- 5. Legal Design
- 5.1. Subject matter
- 5.2. Subareas and the micro-, meso-, and macro-level
- 5.3. Legal communication design
- 5.4. Legal product design
- 5.5. Legal service design
- 6. Visual Law and Legal Design: Similarities and Differences
- 7. Visual Lawyers, Legal Designers, and Responsible Digitalization
- 8. Findings, Conclusions, and Outlook
- 8.1. Response of legal scholarship to visualization
- 8.2. Visual law and legal design
- 8.3. Visual law and legal design: similarities and differences
- 8.4. Visual lawyers, legal designers, and responsible digitalization
- 8.5. Concluding remarks
- 9. References
- 10. Acknowledgments
