Representing Justice

Transitional and Transnational Idioms

Symbolic Courts with Facades of Glass

  • Opaque Transparency
  • The Politics of Glass
  • Zones of Authority

Replenishing the Visual Vocabulary

  • An Interdependent Collective: The Cardinal Four of Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude
  • The Burdens of Judging: The Nails of a Nkisi Figure

Facing Justice’s Injustice

  • Nelson Mandela’s Jail as South Africa’s Constitutional Court
    • Aiming to Capture the Humanity of Social Interdependence
    • Prison Vistas of Barbed Wire
    • Splashes of Color and References to Oppression
    • The Challenge of Crime and Caseloads
  • Visually Recording (in)Justice in Mexico’s Supreme Court
    • Mexican Muralists, Orozco, and “Profoundly National” Paintings
    • George Biddle’s Redemption from the Horrors of War
    • Cauduro’s Vision: Torture, Homicide, and Other Crimes, Unpunished
    • Impunity and Insecurity

Open Tents, Tattered Coats, and the Challenges Entailed in Democratic Promises of Justice

  • “If performed in the open air”:  The Federal Court of Australia’s Ruling on the Ngaanyatjarra Land Claims
  • Terra nullius and the Native Title Act
  • Commemorating Power, Witnessing Compromise
  • An Icon of Free Legal Services in Minnesota
    • More Courthouses than Counties
    • A Jacket, Worn

Facets of Judgment

Adjudication’s Challenges to Democracy

  • Demand and Distress
  • The Data on Privatization: The Vanishing Trial
  • The Methods of Privatization
    • Managerial Judges Settling Cases
    • Unheard Arguments and “Unpublished” Opinions
    • Devolution: Administrative Agencies as Courts
    • Outsourcing through Mandatory Private Arbitration

Regulatory Options: Public Access to Alternative Dispute Resolution

Multi-Jurisdictional Premises (Again)

  • Tracking, Managing, and Obliging Mediation: Lord Woolf’s Reforms in England and Wales
  • Outsourcing to Tribunals
  • Competing for Transnational Arbitration
  • Mediation under the Director of the European Union

Transnational Procedural Shifts

The Continuum on Which Guantanamo Bay Sits

  • The Appointing Authority’s Adjudicatory Discretion
  • Court-Like, Court-Lite: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”

Foucault’s Footsteps

“As judges performed various of their functions in view of the public, they came to be subjected to judgments by the public about whether they, as embodiments (and in that sense representatives) of the governing powers, were living up to the ideals of the non-arbitrary imposition of authority.”

A Triumph of Courts

The Democracy in Adjudication

  • “Hear the Other Side”
  • “Judges as free, impartial, and independent as the lot of humanity will admit”
  • “That justice may not be done in a corner nor in any covert manner”
  • Reflexivity: Transnational Signatures of Justice

Theorizing Openness: From Unruly Crowds to Bentham’s “Publicity”

  • Observing and Cabining Authority: The Dissemination of Knowledge through Codification and Publicity
  • The Architecture of Discipline: From “Judge & Co.” to the Panopticon

Forming Public Opinion Through Complementary Institutions: An Uncensored Press and a Subsidized Postal System

Developing Public Sphere(s)

Adjudication as a Democratic Practice

  • The Power of Participatory Observers to Divest Authority from Judges to Litigants
  • Public Relations in Courts
  • Dignifying Litigants: Information-Forcing through Participatory Parity

The Press, the Post, and Courts: Venerable Eighteenth-Century Institutions Vulnerable in the Twenty-First

“These transnational courts hearken back to the grand town halls of Sienna and Amsterdam, using spacious structures to proclaim and produce authority. The new institutions also forecast the twenty-first-century confusion about what the mandates and powers of courts might be.”

The Peace Palace and the International Court of Justice

  • Convening for Peace
  • The Amsterdam Town Hall Redux: “Dutch High-Renaissance Architecture” for the World’s Library and Court
    • Competing and Litigating for Building Commissions
    • National Artifacts for the World Court
  • Tribunals to Which No Country Can Be “Bidden”
    • The Misnomer of the Permanent Court of International Adjudication
    • The Small Hall of Justice and the PCA
    • The League of Nations’ Permanent Court of International Justice
      • Nationality and Judicial Selection
      • Inaugurating the “World Court” and the Hague Academy for International Law
      • Lawmaking through Advisory Opinions and Contentious Cases
  • The Great Hall of Justice and the United Nations’ International Court of Justice
    • Nationality’s Continuing Import
    • A Celebratory Iconography
    • Renovations, Modernization, and Expansion: Carnegie’s Library at Last
    • A Home for Living Law or a Museum?

Transnational Courts with Specialized Jurisdictions

  • An International Tribunal for the Sea, Seated in Hamburg
    • A “Constitution for the Oceans”
    • Alternatives for International Disputes about the Sea
    • Form before Function
  • International Human Atrocities
    • The International Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone
    • Designing for a Future of Crimes: The International Criminal Court
    • Operationalizing a Criminal Court System
    • Occupying Permanent Quarters Rather than Riding Circuit
    • “One site forever”: A Timeless Image and Four Security Zones

The Logos of Justice: Budgets, Caseloads, Scales, and Buildings

Judging Across Borders

“Mixed Courts,” The Slave Trade and Special Venues for Foreigners

Nation-States Allied Through Courts

  • Luxembourg and the European Court of Justice
    • Enduring (and Expanding) Authority: Le Palais Plus
    • Dominique Perrault’s Golden “morphological development”
    • “Under the watchful eye of paintings and sculptures”
  • Strasbourg and the European Court of Human Rights
    • Le Palais des Droits de L’Homme
    • Building-in Expansion (for Space and Rights)
    • Richard Rogers’s “monumental cylinders”
    • “Easier to see your neighbor’s human rights violations than your own”
    • The ECtHR and the ECJ: The Form of Resources
  • Regional Law: The Organization of American States and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
    • The 1907 Central American Court of Justice: A “permanent court of justice”
    • Shaping a Pan-American Convention on Human Rights
    • Parallels and Distinctions: Human Rights Adjudications in Europe and Americas
    • Costa Rica and the Inter-American Court: Linked “not only by conviction, but by action”
    • Engineering a $600,000 Renovation

<p><em><strong>”Around the globe, government leaders have chosen to house some of their adjudicatory services in buildings designed to be unique, impressive, and secure.”</strong></em><br /><br />Comparative Currents</p><ul><li>Singularly Impressive, Diverse, and Homogeneous</li><li>The Business of Building Courts: The Academy of Architecture for Justice</li></ul><p>Justice Palaces for France</p><ul><li>Legible Architecture for an Evolving Justice</li><li>”Le 1% decoratif”</li><li>Jean Nouvel and Jenny Holzer in Nantes</li></ul><p>Creating New Symbols of Nationhood: A Supreme Court Building for Israel</p><ul><li>”Circles of Justice” and Laws That Are “Straight”</li><li>Roman Cardos, British Courtyards, Moorish Arches, and Jerusalem Stone</li><li>Judgment at the Gate</li><li>”The Symbols”</li><li>Reiterating Familiar Motifs</li></ul><p>New and Recycled from Melbourne to Helsinki</p><ul><li>”Australian in concept and materials”: Melbourne’s Commonwealth Law Courts</li><li>From a Liquor Factory to a District Court in Helsinki</li></ul><p>”Justice Facilities”: Jails, Prisons, and Courts</p>

“The next landmark in a narration of the history of federal courts and of federal building is the commitment by Congress to replace, expand, and renovate hundreds of courthouse facilities.”

Renovation, Rent and William Rehnquist

  • Court Design Guides
    • Rescaling the Proportions
    • Routing Circulation to Avoid Contact
    • Dedicated Courtrooms
  • Negotiating Rent and Space
    • Cutting into the Judicial Dollar
    • Inter-Agency, Inter-Branch Oversight or Intrusion
    • “Rent Relief”
    • A Courtroom of One’s Own
  • Judicial Political Acumen and Incongruity: The Rehnquist Judiciary’s monuments to Federal Adjudication

“Art-in-Architecture”

  • Selecting Community-Friendly Art to “stand the test of time”
  • Collaborative Diversity
  • Quietly Quizzical: Tom Otterness in Portland, Oregon and Jenny Holzer in Sacramento, California
  • “Plop art” and Building Norms

“Three agencies—the Judicial Conference of the United States with its Administrative Office (AO); the General Services Administration (GSA) with its subdivisions, the Public Buildings Service and the Art-in-Architecture Program; and the National Endowment for the Arts—come to the fore as they cooperated and competed for authority and for dollars to shape representations of the federal government and its justice.”

Institutional Girth: In-House Administration, Research, and a Corporate Voice

  • William Howard Taft’s Innovations
  • Building the Administrative Apparatus
  • “Court Quarters”

Putting Cases into Courts: the Second Reconstruction

  • Rights across the Board
  • From a Three-Story Courthouse in Grand Forks to Twenty-Eight Floors in St. Louis and 760,000 Square Feet in Boston
  • Housing the Corporate Judiciary

Redesigning Federal Buildings

  • The Peripheral Role of “Fine Art”
  • John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Government Space: The 1960s Guiding Principles
  • Inelegant Design: The National Endowment for the Arts as Architectural Critic
  • Subsequent Precepts: Preservation, Conservation, Accessibility, Sociability, and Security
  • GSA’s Design Excellence Program

“The deployment of courthouses to signify government was not simply an outgrowth of the expansion of political and economic power. Rather, this special form of building reflects the intersecting interests of three professions— lawyers, judges, and architects—that generated the building type now known as a courthouse.”

Public and Social Traditions in Town and Country Courts

Building a New Legal System in the United States

  • A Grounding in Colonial and State Court Systems
    • Purpose-Built Structures: From Houses to Taverns to Courts
    • Segregating Interiors by Roles and Race
    • Architecture and Adornment
    • Juridical Privilege, Exclusion and Protest
  • Marking a “Federal Presence”
    • Borrowing Space, Rules and Administrative Support
    • Custom Houses, Marine Hospitals, and Post Offices
    • Professional Architects and Public Patronage
    • Courts - From California to the New York Island
      • Statehood for Texas and a New Federal Building in Galveston
      • Building and Rebuilding in Des Moines and Biloxi
    • Moving Further, Farther, and Higher
      • Westward Expansion: Denver, Missoula, and San Diego
      • Offshore and Across Land: Puerto Rico and Alaska
      • Sky High in New York City

Architectural Statements and Obsolescence

“As democratic regimes came to power, governing bodies continued to insist on their own authority to select and direct artists to shape symbols claimed to signify their principles. During the twentieth century, however, as women and men of all colors came to be recognized as rights holders, the decision about which female body was to be called Justice became more complex.”

Juridical Rights and Iconography

  • Public Art and Popular Dismay
  • Batcolumns and Mariannes

Breaching the Conventions of Justice when Decorating the Public Sphere

Judging the Judges: From Spectator to Critical Observer

  • The Appearance of Impartiality
  • Duck Blinds in 2004
  • Restructuring Law’s Possibilities
  • Systemic Unfairness in Individualized Justice
  • Structural Interventions: Judicial Task Forces on Bias in the Courts

Glimpsing the Gaps

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