Page 137 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

128 Geoffrey Sykes

Charles Peirce into legal theory. The overall aim is to address a theory that
begins to answer problems of the incommensurability of natural and
mathematical languages, as employed in legal domains, and to serve
conceptually and methodologically the needs for implementing, designing and
integrating a plethora of multi media tools and processes that are increasingly
common in legal practice.
This chapter argues that a conceptual and paradigmatic approach to the
nature of mathematical reasoning and images, compared with more traditional
forms of legal argument and writing, is necessary for an adequate foundational
approach to opportunities and practices provided by new and emergent media.
This chapter will first overview the relevance of Kevelson and Peirce for a
multi dimensioned understanding of media-as-mathematics. In the second part
it will introduce the research of Kort, and progressively highlight and
comment on its features in terms of key ideas of Kevelson/Peirce.

THE “AMORPHOUS, ENTIRE PROJECT” –
INTRODUCING KEVELSON INTRODUCING PEIRCE

Roberta Kevelson was an American theorist of legal semiotics whose
books have not received the attention they deserve. Their often peripatetic,
cryptic style can in part explain their lack of dissemination; equally, it can be
argued, her visionary conception of the transformative effects of legal
technology and media were just ahead of their times, and neither well
understood nor appreciated by their professional or even scholarly audience.
Kevelson argues for a flexible and generic approach to the
phenomenological and inferential character of legal technology, one that
facilitates ―representation as imaging‖ [1987, p. 74]. ―Not only the medium
but the instrument with which the medium is implemented becomes part of the
total process of enacting values, of creating values.‖ These features allow the
law and its tools to be regarded as ―instruments‖ or media which belong to the
experience and ―creation of more meaning and sense of value‖; such meaning
making extends to all processes of legal argument, decision making and case
management.
It is convenient to adopt Kevelson‘s broad, McLuhanesque understanding
of media and medium, in order to accommodate diverse methods and concepts
involved in the contemporary use of digital and computerised media systems,
in legal domains and also generally in contemporary society. In the past two