The Demoiselles d'Evanston: On the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart

Wigmore's ‘The Problem of Proof’, published in 1913, was a path-breaking attempt to systematize the process of drawing inferences from trial evidence. In this paper, written for a conference on visual approaches to evidence, I look at the Wigmore article in relation to cubist art, which coincidentally made its American debut in New York and Chicago the same spring that the article appeared. The point of the paper is to encourage greater attention to the complex meanings embedded in visual diagrams, meanings overlooked by the prevailing cognitive scientific approaches to the Wigmore method

Charades: Religious Allegory in \u3cem\u3e12 Angry Men\u3c/em\u3e

This article argues that 12 Angry Men is a complex, elaborate biblical allegory. The first half of the article is devoted to showing that the film quietly reenacts a series of stories from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: primarily the story of Christ, but also (among others) the stories of the great flood, the sacrifice of Isaac, the exile in the desert, and the lamentations of Jeremiah. The second half of the article investigates the relation between the film\u27s biblical subtext and its attack on McCarthyism and other pathologies of 1950s American political culture. The article suggests that the film\u27s unspoken portrayal of Henry Fonda\u27s character as a latter-day prophet and savior might be thought of as a sort of subliminal advertisement for the values of legal liberalism (respect for civil liberties, tolerance of dissent, the rule of law, and so on). The article emphasizes some of the tensions and paradoxes in the film\u27s use of allegory, which includes unmistakable ethnic and gender stereotypes deriving from biblical sources