In Law on Display, Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel take readers into the high-tech world of twenty-first-century law. From the evidence gathered by the cameras in the police cars during the Scott v. Harris car chase to the animations and simulations prepared for litigation in the Vioxx product liability and Michael Skakel criminal trials, the authors show how technology can change what attorneys present, what judges are asked to consider in reaching decisions on admissibility, and what jurors see and hear in the courtroom. Laced with images that illustrate their examples, Law on Display presents a compelling picture of multiple aspects of digital technology that have the potential to influence comprehension and persuasion. For example, in the trial of Michael Skakel, accused of murdering his neighbor Martha Moxley, the prosecution's closing argument replayed a portion of a journalist's interview with the defendant that had previously been admitted into evidence. In the closing, it became part of a multimedia CD-ROM that combined the audio and text from the interview in which Skakel recalled how he had reacted when Moxley's mother asked him if he had seen Moxley (“I had a feeling of panic.”) with the picture of Moxley dead, presenting an implicit argument that Skakel felt panic when he recalled in horror what he had done the night before. In another case, the attorney for the SEC in SEC v. Koenig used a series of pictures and animations to describe a complex fraud scheme. How effective were these methods? One can be sure, although seasoned court observers who viewed the arguments were impressed. Did these presentations merely clarify, or did they introduce bias? As Feigenson and Spiesel warn, while the clarity and compelling nature of digital technology can aid comprehension, technology can also mislead. The question increasingly faced by judges is how to evaluate these potential effects. The challenge for judges is that they too are subject to the naïve realism that Feigenson and Spiesel describe, the potentially distorting dangers of the human tendency to believe in the truthfulness of perception.

A few years ago, Judge Michael Brown of the Pima County Superior Court in Arizona spoke to a judicial audience at a panel on jury trials. Imagine, he said, that an eighteenth-century physician entered a twentieth-century hospital operating room. Nothing would look remotely familiar to the time-traveler doctor. In contrast, although an eighteenth-century trial attorney might be surprised by the absence of wigs and the presence of women in the jury box, the twentieth-century courtroom and procedures would be comfortably familiar. Judge Brown was advocating modest innovations in jury trial procedures (e.g., permitting jurors to take notes and submit questions for witnesses). He was not talking about the dramatic technological changes that Feigenson and Spiesel describe in the high-tech litigation they examine in Law on Display. Although the dramatic examples presented in Law on Display may never be standard fodder in the courtroom, computerized visual displays, such as those presented with PowerPoint, are already in regular use in college classrooms across the country, familiarizing future attorneys, judges, and jurors with visual presentations that were unknown to previous generations. Feigenson and Spiesel provide a provocative look at the likely impact of this change in technology for the twenty-first century and beyond.

The book is full of insights and intriguing questions. The authors are generally appropriately cautious, floating hypotheses rather than jumping to confident claims about the benefits and costs of digital-age technology for law. Although Law on Display draws heavily on research about perception, learning, and influence, I was struck by how much legal scholars have yet to learn about the effects of these new technologies. Feigenson and Spiesel have offered a rich research agenda that will occupy researchers for years to come as they work to unpack the circumstances under which various types of digital evidence affect legal proceedings.

The single disappointing aspect of this book is not the substance. Instead, it comes from the editorial decision to place all of the rich footnotes in the back of the book. The text of Law on Display consists of 221 pages of text and 84 pages of footnotes. When footnotes are simply references, endnotes may make sense. When, as here, they add so much content, explaining, enriching, and providing support for the interpretations the authors offer in the text, the placement at the end is simply frustrating. The reader must continually turn to the endnotes to unpack the argument. In a book that draws so heavily on research findings from multiple disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics, as well as law), the reader is better served when those findings are fully described in the text. So this is a warning to the reader that the payoff from Law on Display is not only in the clear exposition of the text, but also in the endnotes. Get your bookmark out and insert it at the beginning of the endnotes. The result will be a stimulating read.