[L]aw ... is largely influenced by the technical methods used by the lawyers in going about their daily business.... The method which they pursue, the character of the books and sources which they use, and the attitude of mind with which they approach them, all have their influence upon the shaping of the law, and upon their conception of law itself.
­Theodore F.T. Plucknett ¹

Law is bound by its form.

In important ways, law is the product of its methods of creation, transmission, and execution. While commentators dwell on the evolution and enforcement of law, little attention is given to the significance of the law's dissemination, the media by which legal messages are communicated. ² This omission ignores the lessons of the law's past and the directions of its future. Any understanding of legal culture is necessarily incomplete without some real appreciation of the role played by its modes of communication, whether oral, scribal, print, or electronic.

Approximately a century after the invention of moveable type, Western legal tradition began to be characterized by print. Today, our legal consciousness is still demarcated and mediated by printed texts. Whether, for example, in the formation and interpretation of wills or contracts, or in the review of court trials and legislative proceedings, the law's primary instrument remains the printed document. Wherever we turn, legal reality is shaped largely by the printed word.

But that reality is changing. We live in an era of "paratexts," in which words and images, as captured by electronic recording, compete with print to represent legally significant events. In using the term "paratexts," we intend to convey two essential ideas. First, we imply a meaning of "text" that extends beyond ("para") its conventional understanding, which is typically limited to written or printed documents. Second, although the term could apply to any electronic form of transmission­such as telephone, radio, film, television, photocopying machine, facsimile ("fax"), computer, laserdisk, compact disk­read only memory ("CD­ROM"), or audio­visual equipment­we intend, for our purposes, to refer only to those technologies that record the images and sounds of persons, places, and events. Among such technologies existing today, the audio­visual camera and playback equipment ("video") have been used more widely by the American legal community than any other technology. Accordingly, in the context we have adopted, "paratext" means the electronic recording produced by currently known video technology in American law and unknown technological inventions that will be the functional analogues of video in the future. ³