Legal Software: Murray: Visual Legal Rhetoric for Cross-Cultural Communication

vineri, 3 octombrie 2014

Murray: Visual Legal Rhetoric for Cross-Cultural Communication

Michael D. Murray of Valparaiso University has posted Visual Legal Rhetoric for Cross-Cultural Communication .

Here is the abstract:

This Article addresses communication within the “new normal” in legal education and law practice in which our audiences of LL.M. and J.D. students, clients, and jurors increasingly are diverse and multicultural. Communication with these audiences can be facilitated by using visual rhetorical techniques to apply a more universal language of communication through images, graphics, and diagrams to bridge gaps in communication caused by cultural and language barriers. This Article is the first to address the challenges presented by the growing population of non-native speakers of English with diverse cultural knowledge, history, and experience in law school and legal settings by looking to the growing body of scholarship on visual rhetoric, which draws from law and popular culture, cognitive studies and brain science, data visualization studies, and modern argument theory in rhetoric. The prevalence and ubiquitous growth of visual media in the world today, delivered across the globe through the pervasive vehicle of the internet, and combined with the technology to create, communicate, receive, and consume visual information, presents opportunities for legal educators and lawyers to use visual rhetorical devices to construct knowledge and understanding in their audiences, and ultimately, to persuade them of the truth and rightness of the communication. Therefore, this Article promotes improvement in the communication of law to language-challenged, culturally diverse audiences by use of the more universal language of visual rhetoric.

HT Helena Haapio