Semiotics of visual evidence in law
AbstractThe evaluation of visual aspects of law has had a profound influence in the last decade in specific fields of legal sciences (i. e., criminology, studies of legal evidence), focusing on the extent to which visual evidence (visual patterns, images, diagrams, and symbols) underpin what and how we can perceive different types of legal evidence, and how the difference in perception affects the manipulation of visual evidence in practice. Taking the recent development in the field of legal evidence seriously, we could claim that the visual communication in law is above all a means of communicating and understanding different types of visual evidence. In general terms, visual exhibits (symbols, images, graphs, photographs, etc.) have the potential to convey more complex meanings and often represent concepts that are challenging to articulate explicitly in more conventional verbal forms of evidence, due to their complexity or lack of specificity. The purpose of this paper is to define the nature and properties of visual aids from a semiotic perspective Visual semiotics offers exceptionally thorough analytical tools for the detailed and nuanced study of visual legal evidence in the courts. In the final part of the paper we’ll illustrate the application of semiotic analysis for evaluating the rules of evidence in the Estonian legal system.