On 26 February 2015 a photograph of a dress with alternating horizontal stripes went viral on the internet, because some viewers perceived the two colours as gold/white and others saw them as black/blue. In short, the viewers perceived and judged the same visual information in very different ways. This episode of an apparent optical illusion aroused great interest in the general public and different members of the scientific community alike (Schlaffke, 2015; Gonzalez Martín-Moro and others, 2018). Soon afterwards a similar phenomenon was observed with sound, namely an auditory illusion in the form of a recording of a word that was heard by some as Laurel and by others as Yanny (Pressnitzer, 2018). From a legal standpoint, these events call into question the value of evidence presented before courts, both visual and auditory evidence as well as other kinds of material. This question has assumed even greater relevance at a time of the digital transformation of evidence, which has not only inaugurated a visual revolution but also affected the rhetoric and broadened the multimedia sources presented in courts, both domestically and internationally (Feigenson and Spiesel, 2009; Porter, 2014; Freeman, 2018). For the future of international adjudication these trends are a reminder of the necessity to inquire more deeply into the links between law and its context, considering all the senses together and not only relying on each of the individual senses separately. In this respect, legal semiotics conceived ‘as a bridge between interdisciplinary knowledges integrating cognitive, linguistic and communicative aspects’, provides a useful tool of analysis, by combining theory and practice as well as finding both their references in law and other sciences (Wagner, 2010, 78).