Abstract
Visual representation of the law and legal process can aid in recall and discussion of complicated legal concepts, yet is a skill rarely taught in law schools. This work investigates the use of flowcharts and similar process-oriented diagrams in contemporary legal literature through a literature review and concept-based content analysis. Information visualisations (infovis) identified in the literature are classified into 11 described archetypal diagram types, and the results describe their usage quantitatively by type, year, publication venue and legal domain. We found that the use of infovis in legal literature is extremely rare, identifying not more than 10 articles in each calendar year. We also identified that the concept flow diagram is most commonly used, and that Unified Modelling Language (UML) is the most frequently applied representational approach. This work posits a number of serious questions for legal educators and practicing lawyers regarding how infovis in legal education and practice may improve access to justice, legal education and lay comprehension of complex legal frameworks and processes. It concludes by asking how we can expect communities to understand and adhere to laws that have become so complex and verbose as to be incomprehensible even to many of those who are learned in the law?
Highlights
It has been previously established that visual representation can aid those engaging with the law to organise, understand, improve collaboration and aid recall of complicated legal concepts.[5,6,7]
All works were screened and those providing: (a) no diagram; (b) diagrams not representative of a legal process, which included many that provided organisation charts of political or judicial hierarchies or houses of parliament; or (c) where the sole diagram was a PRISMA literature search diagram similar to our Figure 1, were all rejected
Just as it was possible for an article to contain one or more diagrams, it was possible for an article to belong to one or more legal domains
Summary
The law is a complex ecosystem, rife with ambiguity and discord such that it can be difficult to know how it works, which legislation should be applied and in some cases whether a defendant’s action falls within prohibited conduct.[1,2,3,4] Legal education and practice are verbal in nature, and written text remains the primary presentation method common to both.[4,5] It has been previously established that visual representation can aid those engaging with the law to organise, understand, improve collaboration and aid recall of complicated legal concepts.[5,6,7] The inclusion of legal visualisations can reduce confusion and miscomprehension for professional and lay-person alike,[4] giving rise to a potential for preventing faulty decision-making and avoiding or mitigating errors and the significant costs associated with relitigating matters.[8] Yet, law students are rarely afforded the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to represent legal concepts using images or graphics, and in practice, it is more often the expert witness who presents visual artefacts to the court.[4] Process maps, known as flowcharts and critical pathways, are common and play an important role in many critical environments,[9] including trauma and chronic disease care[10] and risk assessment in aircraft engineering and maintenance.[11,12] They can present either as maps providing
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