Page 150 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Media as Mathematics - Calculating Justice 141

account of reasoning is possible, which can help resolve the ―two culture‖
dilemma that first faced Kort. If anything, the need and stakes for such an
account have grown in the past four decades, with a proliferation of
computerised and organisation methods in legal institutions.
Peirce‘s pragmatic and behavioural account of mathematics involves what
Kress would call ―visual literacy‖, that can strategically transform the ―forms
of control over meaning‖ in social discourse [Kress, 1996]. Central to the
argument of Peirce, Kevelson and Kress is the identification and utilisation of
the ―diverse, heterogenous world‖ of interpretation and production permitted
by the ―open structure‖ of images. To the extent that images are pictorial and
―unstructured‖, they are subservient to verbal language and reasoning. Yet it is
the openly structured, and modally perceptual potential of images that allows
them to ―sit side by side, and independent of‖ words [Kress and Leeuwen].
The capture and manipulation of cases, using non-parametric methods
such as nearest neighbour, can become a prototypical form of common law in
suitable statutory jurisdictions or where common law is vague or inaccessible.
The opportunity to visualise the nearest neighbour outcomes – who is like
whom on what basis – in linked or networked diagrams, readily springs to
mind, although it not something undertaken by Kort. The lack of visual,
dynamic and diagrammatic expression of his outcomes does date his study –
the computer display and program for such expression was obviously not
available at the time Kort wrote.
The jurisprudential implications of precedent being discovered and argued
through abductive or hypothetical logic are not fully explored by Kort, in any
of his published papers – and this could be a consequent of his limited means
of documenting results. Yet his inquiry is pragmatic and necessarily
intervening: its theory is a form of action, its supplementary study is a
doubling of conventional practice, involving tools and methods that can
potentially change practice.
To some extent, Kort‘s paper anticipates a horse that has since bolted: the
digital revolution, and organisational crises in law administration, have made
mathematical methods far more common than they were forty years ago.
Chronic court delays or client dissatisfaction can provide a general political
discourse for the implementation of supplementary techniques. Such strategies
can seek to close indeterminacies in existing practice through substitutional
organisational efficiencies and new determinacies, while leaving the
ethnographic implications of the adoption of analytic methods that include
creative indeterminancies and semantic inefficiencies, unexplored. There is, in
short, a need for a theory of methodologies, to support multi media legal