Page 22 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Introduction – ―Mediating Mediation‖ 13

communication, and the constructed world of media productions, needs to be
challenged, in court environments as in society generally.
The challenge, raised earlier, for a comparative meta-theory of the
language of law compared to that of media, can begin to be developed or
refocused into one of the diagrammatic or mathematical, in contrast to
rhetorical languages. The former terms can be used in a liberal, conceptual
sense to embrace the wide variety of computerised diagrams, menus, lists,
video timelines, transcripts, spatial displays, headings, borders, as well as
specific computerised computation and statistics, that have become
increasingly embedded into legal environments. It is a comparison already
encountered in the design of computer systems, although their manipulation of
mathematicised data sets shared a desire for public, predictable outcomes
across large numbers of cases.
The chapter by Sykes (―Media as Mathematics) addresses with confidence
and some speciality the use of computerised methods in court related domains
– first through the theoretical perspectives of Roberta Kevelson, and her use of
Charles Peirce, then efforts to study judicial behaviour, in particular the work
of Fred Kort. This chapter reviews and analyses various efforts to introduce
mathematical and digital methods into court environments. It alludes to a
wider methodological issue, of comparison of mathematical and rhetorical
language, of graphic and visual displays, and the certainty and uncertainty of
conclusion. The study focuses on case studies as well as particular
methodologies, and indirectly seeks and presumes a mathematicized paradigm
of contemporary media that can be related to legal practice.
The option for such a theory of the meeting of two cultures, of science and
humanities, in everyday casual social encounters and individual experience,
might seem limited. Kevelson and Peirce are philosophers of language and
sign systems who do address modes of action and informal reasoning within a
conceptual framework of mathematics and graphic tools. Through Kevelson,
Peirce has become a philosopher who has been adopted by legal studies, and it
is possible will continue to offer seminal insights to address issues of language
and reasoning in a multi media law environment. Where does one turn for a
philosophy of media or jurisprudence that can comprehensively address and
explain the contemporary nature of law and media? Kevelson‘s co-option of
Peirce within legal theory might help. Peirce was one who adeptly included a
pragmatic or communicative inquiry within a multi-dimensioned theory of
reasoning and society.