Visual Communication in and about Law

History

The computer has evolved from a calculator and word processor to a multimedia device. With the invention of graphic displays, people who only want to communicate with words acquire, almost as a nonintended surplus, the capacity for the acquisition, processing, storage, and dissemination of pictorial information. Supply is creating demand. Consequently, electronic media will invite the actors of legal communication to use images, at least in addition to language. According to the famous dictum of Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), the medium is the message. To put it more cautiously, communications media inadvertently contribute to reshaping how people understand and practice law. Therefore, visual communication will change the procedures and content of law.

It seems safe to say that modern legal communication consists of text and of almost nothing else. Legal historians, however, could debate that statement. They have used nontextual artifacts as a source of legal history and have even created a legal iconography. Everyone is familiar with the goddess Justice and her attributes: a sword, blindfold, and a set of scales. Officials often decorated medieval courtrooms with a painting of the Last Judgment, and editions of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis sometimes carried a picture of the emperor as the lawgiver. These images served mere symbolic functions, however.

Historians would also point to the fact that medieval manuscript scribes heavily illuminated their work with miniatures and decorative elements. This is also true for some law manuscripts, such as the famous four codices picturati of the German Sachsenspiegel (c. 1220–1230). The bulk of medieval law manuscripts, however, came without pictures. In the early fifteenth century, artisans used woodcuts as a technique for reproducing multiple images of the same pictures. After Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1390–1468) invented printing, woodcuts soon became common in printed books. With a delay of about 50 years, they also appeared in law books. The first quarter of the sixteenth century was the peak of book illustration, with the latter half of that century the peak of law book illustration. Even then, only a small fraction of law books was illustrated; the illustrations served mainly decorative and promotional purposes.

After 1600, the illustrated book fell out of fashion. During the seventeenth century, there were still some illustrated title pages and sometimes portraits of the author. In the eigthteenth century, pictures became rare, and since at least 1800, law books have included only printed letters.

Orality to Literacy

Today we would expect the return of images into law books and legal communication in general. According to McLuhan's claim of the transforming powers of media, the iconic turn must have a substantial impact on legal culture.

Members of the Toronto School of Communication, particularly Jack Goody and Walter Ong, have written [Page 1562]extensively on the transition from orality to literacy. Ong built on McLuhan's general philosophy and anthropological research on the development of oral societies to explain the dramatic changes in society that came about with the advent of literacy. He argued that the shift from an oral to an alphabetical literate culture around the fifth century BCE did more than change patterns of art, politics, and commerce. It also enabled a profound shift in human consciousness, bringing about the linear, abstract forms of Western logic that we take for granted today, but which were unthinkable without literacy as a means of preserving complicated original thought.

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