Visual Regimes, Evidentiary Seeing, and Post-Textual Legal Practices

SW 71- Visual Regimes, Evidentiary Seeing, and Post-Textual Legal Practices

Convenors: Brisa Paim Duarte ; José Manuel Aroso Linhares 

Contact: bpaim@fd.uc.pt; linhares@fd.uc.pt

 

Across legal theory and interpretive practice, textualist devices—paradigmatic both of a certain juridical rationality and of law’s mainstream regime of visibility (its way of seeing)—have taken diverse, and often internally tense, forms: from normalised canons of interpretation and methodical constraints to institutional techniques designed to stabilise meaning, limit discretion, and discipline the articulation of legal grounds and reasons, while simultaneously shaping the broader justificatory (legitimating) narratives through which decisions claim authority in professional and public space.

Contemporary legal life, however, is increasingly shaped by images and visual-performative experiences. This does not refer only to the so-called “evidentiary image” (photographs, video recordings, and all manner of digitised visual emblems and traces), but also to the wider spectrum of visual materialities and performances through which legal conflict is made perceptible: the scenographies of the courtroom, gesture and demonstrative performance, spatial staging, and, more broadly, the visual cultures within which legal practices, conflicts, and materials are staged, filtered, and perceived. These multiple dynamics unfold alongside the migration of legal communication into interface-mediated, platform-structured environments, where visibility is strategically organised by design, protocol, and algorithmic–infrastructural logics, and where legal materials are continuously re-inscribed, re-enacted, and recirculated.

What matters here is less the occasional “admission” of images into the record than the fact that, under contemporary visual hegemony, images increasingly intercept the very conditions under which legal meaning is constituted and construed, proof is assembled, and judgment is rendered—even as they are continuously re-captured within the textual frames and methodical constraints traditionally fixed by legal discourse.

In this context, recapture does not amount to resolution. The image is not a self-contained fact but an autonomous problem—one that sharpens in the present practical-cultural horizon, where visual apparitions circulate as mutable forces within infrastructures of visibility and economies of attention. The question, then, is not only how courts use images, but how images are experienced and rendered—through institutional reenactment—into juridically treatable materialities: how they come to function as “facts” to be qualified, “evidence” to be exposed and contested, “reasons” to be articulated, or “authority” to be either silently presupposed or openly imposed; what is lost, displaced, or occluded in that passage; and what methodological and procedural devices govern their capture, contestation, and translation into legal grounds.

Within this framework, we invite contributions—across legal philosophy, theory and methodology, evidence and procedure, public law, legal semiotics, visual culture and media studies, socio-legal research, performance studies, and related fields—that engage the interplay between legal practices and visual experiences in a double key:

1 — A first axis concerns legal thought and interpretive currents, asking how verbalist and textualist approaches (and their hybridisations) are articulated, defended, refined, or challenged when legal meaning is shaped by visual practices; how textual canons, reading, and legibility operate as methodical technologies that constrain legal vision; and how images may appear as premises, exemplars, or constraints within interpretive disputes, whether acknowledged or left implicit.

2 — A second axis turns to adjudication and evidentiary life, examining how images and visual performances reconfigure fact-finding, credibility, relevance, probative force, and the grounding of legal conclusions; how courts succeed—or fail—in rendering visual materialities juridically treatable; and how the promise of transparency often travels with new forms of opacity, asymmetry, and contested visibility.

The aim is not merely to “add images” to debates on interpretation, but to examine how visuality reshapes the conditions under which law treats controversies as legally decidable, including the risks and promises of contemporary post-textual practices: from the domestication of images as illustrative appendices to the emergence of new genres of reasoning and hybrid judgment-forms. In particular, this Special Workshop is attentive to the way images may matter differently across two planes that legal discourse keeps in a productive tension: the grounding of decisions (the internal craft of grounds and reasons) and the broader work of justificatory legitimation through which decisions claim authority beyond the case—raising, in each register, distinct problems of visibility, contestability, and juridical commensurability.

Submission guidelines and timeframes:

Abstract of up to 300 words, plus 5 keywords, and a short bio (max. 150 words)

must be sent to bpaim@fd.uc.pt.

• Abstract deadline: 1 May 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 15 May 2026.