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Recently Published Papers on Visual Law and on Multisensory Law: Abstracts

Colette R. Brunschwig

2013-07-29 10:00

I. 27th Nordic Conference on Law and IT (2123 November 2012, Stockholm)

Last year, the 27th Nordic Conference on Law and IT was held in Stockholm. Its title was "Internationalisation of law in the digital information society." There was a panel on the visualization of law, that is, on visual law (see http://www.juridicum.su.se/iri/e12/).

Dan Jerker B. Svantesson (http://works.bepress.com/dan_svantesson/11/) and Stanley Greenstein (http://www.juridicum.su.se/iri/organisation/Stanley_Greenstein/) edited the conference proceedings (see Dan Jerker B. Svantesson and Stanley Greenstein, eds., Internationalisation of Law in the Digital Information Society: Nordic Yearbook of Law and Informatics 2010–2012 (Copenhagen: Ex Tuto Publishing, 2013) (see http://www.extuto.com/#978-87-92598-22-6).

To invite you to read this book, I have extracted the abstracts of the papers delivered on the legal visualization panel. I won’t comment on them.

II. Abstracts

1. Visualisation of Law: Tanzanian Perspective (Innocent Mgeta)

"Innovations in ICT have influenced rapid changes in our modern world. Traditional ways of doing things have been forced to change significantly to cope up with changes in technology and therefore forcing those responsible for policymaking and law enforcement to adopt mechanisms, which will enable law to fit in, understood and enforced within the ambits of the new technology. Those who are not interested with law in texts now have options to know the law through simulation, visual images, graphic representations, diagrams, charts, tables and other kind of illustrations. Nowadays, one may argue that the citizens’ access to law and justice is made simple through simulation, visual, and audio technologies.

This paper, among other things, intends to explore the general understanding of the concept of visualization of law, its rationale, its application in law enforcement, and the general experience and application of the concept of visualization of law in the Tanzanian legal system. The paper will also show, albeit briefly, the challenges facing Tanzania, as one of the developing countries, in adapting rapid changes in ICT including simulation and visual technologies in its traditional legal system. The paper will also show, albeit briefly, the challenges facing Tanzania, as one of the developing countries, in adapting rapid changes in ICT including simulation and visual technologies in its traditional legal framework" (p. 217).

2. Visualising Contracts for Better Business (Helena Haapio)

"Commercial contracts are blueprints for business. They contain technical, financial, business, and legal terms. Most of the deal-specific content is provided by business managers rather than lawyers. Once the contract is made, project managers and operative teams take over: they are in charge of implementing contracts.

Major contract risks are caused by the gaps when information and responsibility are transferred from one team to the other. In order for contract designers to capture business objectives and for contracts to transmit obligations to the implementation team, cross-professional communication must succeed.

So far, the focus of contract drafters has been predominantly on the needs of lawyers: litigants, judges, and arbitrators. The needs of clients have been to a great extent neglected. For clients, most contracts look like legal documents that only experts can decode. If we prioritise the needs of clients, legal writing is not the way to go. Changing the way contracts are written, moving from legalese to plain language, certainly helps. While contracts need to be legally sound, their design should be driven by what clients want and deserve: contracts that they can easily understand and act upon. Here, visualization enters the picture.

This chapter demonstrates, which examples, how visualisation can help change contract design and communication and enable managers and lawyers to better understand and address current business needs and learn from past mistakes. User test results and research work in progress indicate that these approaches have the potential to fundamentally change the way contracts are designed, communicated and perceived, offering unexplored opportunities for both research and practice. The chapter concludes with an example where a simple timeline image could have prevented a major misunderstanding and a multi-million legal dispute" (p. 285 sq.).

3. A Graphical User Interface for Legal Texts (Tobias Mahler)

"Would it be possible and useful to create a graphical user interface for legal texts? The utility of such an attempt is difficult to judge in advance, but we know from graphical user interfaces for computer code that visualization often tends to improve user friendliness. The real question is therefore whether it would be feasible to develop a graphical user interface for legal code and other legal texts. This article sketches a possible approach for visualizing essential normative notions that are well understood in legal logic. This approach could be taken as a starting point for a possible future design of a graphical user interface for legal texts" (p. 311).

4. Law Is Not or Must Not Be Just Verbal and Visual in the 21st Century: Toward Multisensory Law (Colette R. Brunschwig)

"Humans are multisensory beings and live in a multisensory world. Human communication involves the production and perception of messages, as well as the five senses (hearing, vision, touch, taste, and smell). Multimodal or multisensory systems are capable of receiving and sending information by using various sensory channels involving vision, hearing, and movement, but preferably all five senses. Such computer systems are used not only in human communication but also in machine communication. These systems have brought forth a trend toward multisensory digital communication practices in the 21st century. Such multisensory digital media help us produce meaning by using two or more discrete sign systems (i.e., audio-visual, visual-kinaesthetic, tactile-kinaesthetic, and so forth). The advent of digital media and their implications for the law has prompted some scholars to suggest that a visual turn is also occurring in the legal context. Whereas this may be partly true, by restricting or confining the law to the verbal and visual, legal discourse has difficulties in becoming sufficiently aware of multisensory digital media and thus fails to adequately explore these media and their impact on the law–in overt contradiction to the growing significance of such media. Overemphasising both verbal and visual legal communication leads to marginalizing or even to ignoring other modalities of already existing or future digital legal communication. Given these problems, this paper seeks to develop tentative answers to five key questions: 1. What is multisensory law? 2. What are the impacts of multisensory digital media on the law? 3. How could or rather should greater awareness be raised in the legal discourse about the current and future relevance of multisensory digital media for the law? 4. How could or rather should the marginalizing and ignoring of multisensory digital legal communication practices be challenged? 5. How are these research questions relevant to legal discourse, particularly legal history, legal informatics, legal pedagogy, legal psychology, and legal theory? In addressing these questions, this paper draws on insights from different legal and non-legal disciplines, such as the anthropology of the senses, communication studies, legal history, legal informatics, legal psychology (therapeutic jurisprudence), legal theory, multisensory law, perceptual psychology, and so forth" (p. 231 sq.) (see also http://www.zora.uzh.ch/79865/ and  http://www.rwi.uzh.ch/oe/zrf/abtrv/brunschwig/publications_en.html).

III. Desideratum

For those readers who would rather not purchase the whole book, I would like to encourage Ex Tuto Publishing (http://www.extuto.com/) to make available the papers on visual law and multisensory law also as PDF files. Such an editorial practice would meet not only the needs of legal informatics but also the standards of state-of-the-art scholarly publishing.

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