Thursday, December 22, 2005

New from SSRN

Law in the Digital Age: How Visual Communication Technologies are Transforming the Practice, Theory, and Teaching of Law

RICHARD K. SHERWIN
New York Law School - General
NEAL FEIGENSON
Quinnipiac University - Law School
CHRISTINA O. SPIESEL
Yale University - Law School August 30, 2005

NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05/06-6

Abstract:
Law today has entered the digital age. The way law is practiced - how truth and justice are represented and assessed - is increasingly dependent on what appears on electronic screens in courtrooms, law offices, government agencies, and elsewhere. Practicing lawyers know this and are rapidly adapting to the new era of digital visual rhetoric. Legal theory and education, however, have yet to catch up.

This article is the first systematic effort to theorize law's transformation by new visual and multimedia technologies and to set out the changes in legal pedagogy that are needed to prepare law students for practice in the new environment. The article explores the consequences for legal theory and practice of the shift from an objectivist to a constructivist approach to human knowledge, using an expanded, multidisciplinary understanding of rhetoric to analyze the elusiveness of evidentiary truth and the nature and ethics of persuasion in the digital era.


Keywords: legal studies, public law legal theory, law and technology, legal theory

Working Paper Series

Suggested Citation

Sherwin, Richard K., Feigenson, Neal and Spiesel, Christina O., "Law in the Digital Age: How Visual Communication Technologies are Transforming the Practice, Theory, and Teaching of Law" (August 30, 2005). NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05/06-6 http://ssrn.com/abstract=804424



Social Software, Groups, and Law


MICHAEL J. MADISON
University of Pittsburgh School of Law August 16, 2005

Abstract:
Formal groups play an important role in the law. Informal groups largely lie outside it. Should the law be more attentive to informal groups? The paper argues that this and related questions are appearing more frequently as a number of computer technologies, which I collect under the heading social software, increase the salience of groups. In turn, that salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. The paper suggests that there may be important social benefits associated with informal groups, and that the law should move towards a framework for encouraging and recognizing them. Such a framework may be organized along three dimensions by which groups arise and sustain themselves: regulating places, things, and stories.

Keywords: Groups, computer software, salience, innovation, governance, narrative, place, artifacts, STS, cognitive science

Working Paper Series

Suggested Citation

Madison, Michael J., "Social Software, Groups, and Law" (August 16, 2005). http://ssrn.com/abstract=786404

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