Meme creation as a way towards understanding Law. 

Comedy can create understanding by elevating the everyday or simplifying the incomprehensible. For example: there is a laugh of recognition when the pedestrian woes of our lives are laid out in all their purposelessness, the things we worry about discussed in a line or two as not worth the emphasis we place on them. Alternatively the complex can be broken down in a skit so that we giggle along with the understanding that the preciousness and strain of topics beyond us may not deserve their gravity. This is also a useful way to emphasize crucial points of a complex topic. 

The latest Meme I created is an attempt not at explanation, though that will be a focus for future posts, instead I thought to point at the hilarity of previously grave situations and how they are reflected in contemporary pop culture moments. 

The point is not to laugh at law, but to perhaps laugh at the graveness with which burning one’s personal property was once held in. Of course the burning of draft cards is destruction of government property which is fundamentally different from burning purchased goods. The act of burning the draft card was also taken as a vote of no confidence regarding the American involvement in foreign war. 

Part and parcel of our approach is to make memes which bring loft legal language into easily understood language. We are doing this through infographics which summarize cases and the website will offer brief colloquial explanations of what Freedom of Speech activity was at the center of the case; which is something that can get lost in all the deliberation over it. Offering contemporary, but sometimes trivial examples, allow the viewer to form a connection with the case law, and ultimately invites them to study it further.