Visual Imagery and Law Teaching
by
Karen Gross

One of the challenges facing those teaching first-year students is how to help students learn to compare and contrast cases. The task involves multiple skills, including the ability to think critically about what one is reading. For many students, this is a very difficult task and takes considerable time (and many frustrating moments). In thinking about the difficulty of the task, it struck me that today's students are very visually oriented and fully capable of making comparisons of visual imagery. Indeed, visual comparisons are much easier for some students than word and concept comparisons. This led me to use fine-art imagery in my first-year class.

I do this exercise about a month or so into the semester--long enough to have dealt with a small repertoire of cases and short enough to still be able to capture lost students. I show the students two portraits, one by Picasso of Marie Therese (1937) and one by Dante Gabriel Rossetti called La Ghirlandata (1873)....

I begin by asking students what similarities there are between the portraits, and I put their findings up on the board. Students make the following kinds of observations: both portraits are of women; both are in color; both women are seated; both women are looking to the side; both women look distant and detached; both women have their arms near their faces. Then I ask students to identify the differences between the portraits. They make the following kinds of observations: the styles are distinct--the Picasso is modern and cubist while the Rossetti is more realistic and "old-fashioned"; the colors used by Picasso are primary and vibrant; Rossetti uses softer, natural color; Picasso's portrait seems harsh and hard; Rossetti's seems almost tender and appealing; Picasso uses straight lines and edges; Rossetti uses curves and shading....

I then talk to the students about what they have just done. (I deconstruct, in essence, the art comparisons.) At the simplistic level, they have found in art what I want them to find in cases. In comparing the portraits, they have compared "cases" and have identified what in law we call "fact similarities and differences." I emphasize that cases, like paintings, tell a story, and each story is different. Reading cases, then, is searching for similarities and differences in a story--expressed in words, not paint.

I then move the analysis to another level. First, I talk about the artists. Both were painting women they knew; both had complex relationships with these women....Picasso drew in the 20th century; Rossetti drew in the 19th century. I then ask the significance of these added observations.

From this added material, I talk about the importance of recognizing when cases were decided (like when paintings were painted). Many legal decisions are products of their era and can be explained or justified based on the then-existing state of the law. I then discuss the idea of legal evolution, how the cases we read show movement (some would say progress). I alert students to think about cases as having a time and a place and to identify their context.

I then talk about the painters and their styles and approaches. I analogize this to judicial styles. I introduce students to the idea that judges bring to their decision-making certain judicial approaches. I talk about judicial activism and judicial restraint. I talk about judicial philosophy. I keep returning to the differences (visual) between Picasso and Rossetti. I ask students to pay attention to who wrote the decisions as they read cases.

I then explain that cases operate at many levels--like a multi-layered cake. They tell a story; they represent a particular time in legal development; they reflect a judicial philosophy. So when reading cases, one needs to work at all of these levels. We then put the exercise into action by comparing and contrasting two cases and applying same to a hypothetical.

...[T]he value of the exercise is that it has a lasting benefit....The use of art gives some students an ability to "see" what is happening in the law school classroom for the first time. While there are students for whom the art is largely meaningless or for whom the exercise does not work, for those who suddenly can see, the exercise is well worth the time and effort.