Richard Kenneth Sherwin

Background

Richard Kenneth Sherwin was born on June 23, 1953, in New York City, New York, United States. He is a son of Stanley Francis and Erma Sherwin.

Education

In 1975 Richard Kenneth Sherwin received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University. In 1981 he obtained a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Boston College. In 1985 Sherwin gained a Master of Laws degree from Columbia University. In 1989 he received a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from that university.

Career

From 1981 to 1984 Richard Kenneth Sherwin worked as an assistant district attorney of the County of New York. From 1985 to 1988 he was a coordinator of the lawyering program at New York Law School and has been a professor since 1988.

His book When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture (2000) examines the effects of postmodernism and mass media on court proceedings. A former New York prosecutor, Sherwin critiques attorneys’ use of emotional accounts and hypothetical narratives to sway juries. Analyzing films by Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, the author demonstrates how our society’s ideas of justice have been absorbed by popular culture.

In 2001 Sherwin began teaching Visual Persuasion in the Law, the first course in the nation to teach students about the role, efficacy, and pitfalls of using visual evidence and visual advocacy in contemporary legal practice. Working in the Law School's digital media lab, students in this course create short documentary films pertaining to a legal topic or controversy.

His most recent book, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements (Routledge 2011) examines the interpenetration of law and the visual throughout the history of modern culture up through the current era, which he calls the age of the digital baroque. His edited volumes include Law, Culture and Visual Studies (2013), Popular Culture and Law (2006), etc.

In 2013 Sherwin was awarded the Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair in Law and Literature at McGill University under the auspices of McGill Law School and the Institute for the Public Life of Art and Ideas and was in residence during the spring 2014 semester. He served most of July 2014 as a visiting research fellow at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, College of Arts and Social Sciences at Australia National University in Canberra, Australia.

A frequent public speaker both in the United States and abroad, Professor Sherwin is a regular commentator for television, radio, and print media on the relationship between law, culture, film, and digital media. His appearances include NBC’s Today Show, Court TV, WNET, National Public Radio, RTE Radio 1 (National Public Radio in Ireland), and CKUT (Montreal, Canada) and Jeremiah Zagar’s highly acclaimed documentary film "Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart" (2014).

Achievements

• Richard Kenneth Sherwin is best known as an expert on visual evidence and visual persuasion in litigation and litigants’ public relations. He has written widely on the interrelationship between law and culture. He gained international attention with his well-received book, When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture.

Works

More photos

• book

  • When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture

    (The past few decades have seen the legal system entering ...)

    2000
  • Law, Culture and Visual Studies

    (The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary aud...)

    2013
  • Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements

    (Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explore...)

    2011

Views

In 2005 Richard Kenneth Sherwin launched the Visual Persuasion Project website, the first and to date the only website dedicated to showcasing 'best practices' in the visual litigation field. The Project seeks to promote visual literacy among lawyers, judges, law students, and the lay public by cultivating a better understanding of visual communication practices.

Richard K. Sherwin’s book When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture examines the effects of postmodernism and mass media on court proceedings. A former New York prosecutor, Sherwin critiques attorneys' use of emotional accounts and hypothetical narratives to sway juries. Analyzing films by Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, the author demonstrates how our society’s ideas of justice have been absorbed by popular culture. Robert C. Jones of the Library Journal stated, "With judges in TV courtrooms resolving real-life conflicts and nightly newscasts blurring into legal docudramas, Sherwin suggests that truth has become a relative concept." He recognizes the positive effect that postmodernism has had on justice system, no longer allowing a society to hold the notion of a single objective truth. Sherwin devotes one chapter of his book to questioning the methods used by the lawyers trying the cases of John Brown, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harry K. Thaw.

Membership

Richard Kenneth Sherwin is a member of the New York Bar Association and Law and Humanities Association.

Connections

On May 21, 1982 Richard Kenneth married Gilda Lubasz Rozenberg. They have two children: David Alexander, Elliana Gabrielle.

Father:

Stanley Francis Sherwin

Mother:

Erma Sherwin

Spouse:

Gilda Lubasz Rozenberg

Son:

David Alexander Sherwin

Daughter:

Elliana Gabrielle Sherwin

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2010