There has been no shortage of new rhetorics in the modern era and in the present volume another morphosis, the contemporary novelties of persuasion, is tracked anew. There is something of a genre, a rhetoric of the novum, that accompanies the proliferation of new media and causes disruption and disturbance in the supposed stasis, the permanence, publicity and authority of law. A genealogy of new rhetorics would thus take account of a variety of different contexts of oratorical renovation and their disciplinary proponents and limitations. The most notable instances were the late Enlightenment, associated particularly with Scottish philosophical elaborations, Nietzsche's lectures on eloquence and then the better-known or at least more jurisprudentially recognised Belgian nouvelle rhétorique promulgated as a logique juridique by Chaïm Perelman. It is in relation primarily to the latter that the current upsurge takes its place as something of an inversion of the earlier juridifi cation of the rhetorical in favour now of a recognition of the inevitable and critically contested persuasiveness of law. As belief in the inexorable logic of law, the authority of the legal norm and validity of juristic examples dims and wanes, it is no longer rhetoric that draws on law but rather the jurists who need to legitimate judgment through mustering the categories and borrowing the performative techniques of a discipline of persuasion that had previously been viewed as not simply impertinent to the gravitas of justice but actively misleading if inserted into the logic of law. The much maligned fl owers of rhetoric are now the seeds of survival of an embattled normative form.

The context of the current work, its novelty, lies primarily in the recognition and attempt to come to terms with the new media of legal dissemination, the anarchy of multiplications, the exigencies of a novel episteme and techne. Advanced algorithms of execution, proliferating platforms, and the mobile optimisation of bytes and nibbles, screenshots, gifs, tweets, emojis, emoticons and more unleash the law from its earlier methodological norm, scrutamini scripturas, and its archival and disciplinary restraint, its biblically endorsed and exegetically composed transmission of exemplum and norm.