I will start this review with a lengthy statement, setting out what I believe is the importance of a rights agenda. The language of rights can make visible what has too long been suppressed. It can lead to new stories being heard in public. As Carrie Menkel-Meadow (1987, p. 52) has put it: ‘Each time we let in a new excluded group, each time we listen to a new way of knowing, we learn more about the limits of our current way of seeing.’

What conditions are necessary for juries to work effectively? Legal scholars and social scientists have debated this question, and research in psychology and law demonstrates that jurors are easily confused by scientific evidence and readily swayed by the slick framing of argument. Rather than condemn juries as unworkable, however, I demonstrate experimentally that jurors need not possess legal or scientific sophistication to make reasoned choices during trials. Specifically, I demonstrate that various institutions embedded in our legal system (such as penalties for lying and the threat of verification) can substitute for sophistication and enable even unsophisticated individuals to learn what they need to know. Based on these findings, I argue that rather than advocate blue ribbon juries and bench trials as replacements for citizen juries, scholars should instead seek substitutes for jurors’ lack of sophistication in the institutions of our legal system.

The practice of law today is awash with pictures of all kinds – from those that begin conceptually like graphs, diagrams or flow charts to those that originate in perception, like photographs, or those that emerge from the actions of technology, like animations and fMRI. Pictures are used as evidence, demonstratives, and for argument. The legal academy has yet seriously to come to grips with the changes that this infusion of the visual means for legal thinking and rhetoric. This article explores the intellectual implications of picturing in a discipline that has thought of itself as preeminently about the use of words and their linear logics. To do this, the author has sought out eye movement research, asking the question: Do we read pictures differently from words? If so, what are the implications of this as understood both in cognitive terms and in cultural terms? That is, can the differences in perceptual behaviour be seen as offering clues to differences in cognitive behaviour? Existing knowledge seems to answer these questions in the affirmative, which means that the deeply held cultural bias that maintains that only words containing thought needs revision. This article concludes with reflections on some benefits that adjustments to our understanding might give to legal thinkers.

This is a paper about promulgation, and whether it is a sine qua non of law. The promulgation question has been treated occasionally in the jurisprudential literature, although typically only as a subordinate theorem. This paper does not attempt a thorough conspectus, seeking rather to serve as an introductory to what is a longstanding problem of general interest and concern. An argument for the proposition that laws are things that can be known will be distinguished from two other ways of responding to the promulgation question, which may be attributed respectively to the late H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller. The paper defends this proposition about artefactuality and access, and deals with a number of awkward consequences that appear to ensue from its acceptance.