Common law is predicated historically upon a sense of the common, of custom and use time out of mind. The legal tradition has its roots in a guild, an elite community whose common opinion and conversations provided the substance and sensibility of the normative. Remediation of law, meaning here the changing media of legal transmission, the imaginal turn in the streamed and viral relays of law and its enforcement, confront a monochrome and linear textual tradition, the regimentations of the page, with the fragmentary and anarchic optics of online platforms and social media bytes and nibbles. Increased online visibility, this essay argues, forces the guild to face up to an expanded commons, the diversity of colors, the heuristics of the eye, and the nuances of viewing.
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