As visual imagery begins to play a larger role in the courtroom, lawyers will need to cultivate an ability to use and critique visual evidence. To that end, Richard Sherwin, Neal Feigenson, and Christian Spiesel have begun training students at New York Law School and Quinnipiac Law School in "visual persuasion." The website of the Visual Persuasion Project at NYLS has a wealth of interesting information on their courses, available litigation services, and law and popular culture bibliographies. From the website:
The goal of the Visual Persuasion Project is to promote a better understanding of the practice, theory, and teaching of law in the current screen-dominated, pervasively visual, digital era. The Project was formed to study and advance the cultivation of critical visual intelligence, to inspire creative visualizations of evidence, case narratives, policy analysis, and legal argumentation, and to help lawyers, judges, law students, and the lay public integrate new visual tools into more traditional (textual and verbal) approaches to legal analysis.
The issues raised by visual evidence should be important to neuroethics for a number of reasons. Most obviously, juries are increasingly being shown images created by neuroscientific techniques such as CAT scans and fMRIs. These "expert images," as Joseph Dumit calls them, raise concerns about the inferences jurors are likely to draw from colorful images presented alongside scientific testimony. More broadly, however, those interested in neuroethics should think about the cognitive effects of all sorts of visual evidence, from diagrams and maps to photographs, films, and digital images. How does the brain process information received visually instead of or in addition to information received aurally? Does it respond to still images differently from moving images or black and white images differently from colored images? As I have argued, judges may be capable of handling the technological differences between various media to create appropriate admissibility safeguards, but they are likely to overlook more fundamental concerns about the way visual media convey meaning.
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