Video Conferencing Platforms (VCPs) and the Cohesive Distinctiveness of Legal Proceedings

This article examines the essential difference between a hearing held in a court, physically attended by the parties and their lawyers, and a hearing held through Video Conferencing Platforms (VCPs) VCP. The premise pursued here is that virtual hearing lacks an important quality of the trial as a cultural phenomenon – cohesive distinctiveness. The poetics of the virtual hearing relies on such a different concept of space and time that it produces not an approximation of the traditional court hearing, but as a simulacrum, which undermines important elements of the legal hearing, and deprives it of its unique cultural power and function. The paper concludes with enhancing the necessity of a new digital poetics of law through which the cohesive distinctiveness of the legal process will not be reduced, but reimagined.