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CS92PROD
Fact and Artifact: Visual Persuasion, Expert Evidence, and the Law
CHUM 346
Fall 2011
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: SISP 346, HIST 305

This seminar will explore how lawyers are deploying new visual and digital media and how judges and jurors are responding. We will also take a broader perspective, analyzing how digital technologies and new habits of using them in everyday life are reshaping the nature of legal knowledge and altering the ever-shifting relationships between law and the wider culture. We will discuss how law can be approached as a co-producer of popular culture, as when pictures from a trial are absorbed into the vernacular of society, often through television and film, but also through documentary films. Some of the questions we will ask include: How do lawyers, judges, and juries think with pictures? How is justice pursued in these new environments? What constitutes proof or trustworthy evidence when judgments of guilt or innocence may turn on the kinds of audiovisual displays that jurors are used to seeing in movies, advertisements, and the Internet? The course is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for debating issues of ethics and justice in the digital visual age.

Essential Capabilities: Information Literacy, Interpretation
Interpretation:The course will address how legal facts depend upon and produce symbolic and aesthetic logics of representation.
Information Literacy: The course enhances students' skills of reading pictures in the law and communication.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS CHUM
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: None
Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available

Last Updated on APR-26-2024
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