Now more than ever, visual evidence of various forms is occupying a greater space in the practice of law. Smartphones, body-worn cameras, surveillance footage, applications like PowerPoint, and even animation are sources of evidence for whether or not the accused has committed a crime. Lawyers need to make compelling cases alongside bountiful amounts of visual evidence that can actually be interpreted in many different ways based on their arguments. For nearly four decades, Neal Feigenson has has been teaching students at the Quinnipiac University School of Law about how to navigate this proliferating dimension and be successful in a court of law.

Neal was recently selected to hold an inaugural endowed chair at the Quinnipiac University School of Law, where has been a faculty member since 1987.

“I've been with the school through a lot of changes, but throughout, it's been just a wonderful place to work with fantastic colleagues, great students, and great support,” says Neal. “It's got everything that I would want at a law school.”

The courses that Neal teaches at Quinnipiac relate to his primary research that focuses on the psychology of legal decision making and the uses of visual and multimedia evidence to support persuasive legal arguments before a jury.

While photographic and video presentations may initially present themselves as irrefutable evidence of a crime, a different case can be made when appealing to psychological aspects such as the inherent biases of jurors who are not typically legal experts.

Neal raises an example of an experimental study that he and his law colleagues recently submitted for peer review. In the study, a jury is about to be shown a video captured by a police officer’s body-worn camera. Neal and his fellow researchers asked, “Do the words that attorneys use in their opening statements before any of the jurors see the video affect the way they see it?”

By constructing different arguments pertaining to the same video, outcomes are not always the same due to the powers of persuasion.

“We found that it affects the ultimate decisions that our mock jurors or experimental subjects made,” said Neal. “It also affects what they think they saw and, in some cases, the words that attorneys use can make them more likely to agree with a statement that based on the video is absolutely false.”

At Quinnipiac’s School of Law, Neal teaches his students how to construct persuasive arguments and appeal to reason and emotions that are adjacent to a multitude of visual evidence. This is a central aspect of an experiential course that Neal teaches focusing on visual persuasion through multimedia.

“It's a course in which students learn to use pictures and videos to make legal arguments,” he says. “They might use these in negotiations in presentations to a legislature, [they might] have visuals to accompany to explain their points.”

Neal has taught this course that he co-created for around 20 years alongside Quinnipiac professor Christina Spiesel. It’s a course that is more important than ever in today’s world, says Neal.

“Culture today is primarily or certainly importantly visual,” he says. “We think that lawyers need to be more conversant with visual things—with pictures, how pictures make meaning, what you can say in response if the other side shows a picture—not just basic questions of what lawyers call ‘authentication.’...What we really address in the course is developing people's visual sensibility, knowing that just because you think a picture means ‘X,’ somebody else might think it means something very different.”

“You need to appreciate how many different things your pictures can mean, so that you can present and shape them in a way that's going to best serve your purposes,” Neal adds.

To support this element of legal practice, Neal says that students in the visual persuasion course are offered “very bare bones training” in video production and editing and are tasked to apply these skills as part of visual aid to support an argument in a mock trial established in the classroom.

Whether or not it’s through the use of multimedia, Neal knows that the means of relating the mind and heart is not a new practice. In fact, it’s an ancient one in the art of persuasion.

“Going back 2,400 years to Aristotle, the effective argument should make both the logical appeal or logos, but also the emotional appeal or pathos,” says Neal. “In so doing the third part of the Aristotelian triangle—ethos—you are, in the way you make your argument, you are presenting yourself…as somebody who's knowledgeable, honest, trustworthy, on top of things. All those things have to come together.”