Disputes about how to show Justice’s “face” and about Law’s “sight” reflect the analytic challenges that have engaged philosophers from John Locke to John Rawls, as they parsed the relationships among sensory perceptions, intuition, evidentiary truths, and cognition. The question of sight has also been engaged by leaders of justice systems acknowledging histories of exclusion and unfair subordination based on the gender, race, ethnicity, and class of disputants.”
Inconographical Conventions, Pictorial Puzzles, and Justice’s Blindfold
Constitutional Metaphors and Injustices
“Although the blindfold has come to be valorized, it was once seen—as cartoonists often use it today — to denote a disabled Justice, blind to or hiding from the truth.”
Blind to the Light and Blindfolded by the Fool
Transcendent, Wide-Eyed, and Amidst the Animals
The Past as Prologue: Sighted or Blindfolded, and Tall
A Resilient, Albeit Invented, Tradition
“The inspirational image of Justice as a virtuous goddess is commonplace in contemporary buildings. But few of the weighty allegorical depictions that were ubiquitous from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries have come down to us. These complex images were part of a tradition called exempla virtutis (examples of virtue) that identified acts “worthy of imitation” and therefore appropriate to display on town hall walls. By unearthing the classical myths, biblical stories, and Renaissance emblems that make decipherable pictures that might otherwise be ignored, one can find many references to the violence entailed—both for the judged and for judges—in adjudication.”
Flayed Alive or Maimed: Judicial Obligations Inscribed on Town Hall Walls in Bruges and Geneva
The Challenge and Pain of Rendering Judgement: Amsterdam’s Seventeenth-Century Town Hall
“So Shall You Be Judged”
“As a form of political propaganda, Justice has had a remarkable and distinctive run.”
A Long Political Pedigree: Shamash, Maat, Dike, and Themis
Justicia, St. Michael, and the Cardinal Virtue Justice
Civic Spaces, Allegories of Good and Bad Government, and Fourteenth-Century Sienna
Last Judgments in Town Halls
“To practice justice today is an ambitious project, and to represent it requires devising ways to acknowledge what democracy brings to adjudication: a new and genuinely radical aspiration to find ways to make earthly justice available to more people, if not all. “
A Pictorial Puzzle
A Virtuous Visual Competition
Justice’s Violence
Visualizing Justice’s Pain and Challenges
Adjudication’s Transformation: Access for All Before Independent Judges in Open Court
Democracy’s Challenges
Re-Presenting Justice
The relationship between courts and democracy is at the center of this book, and the principal claims can be set forth simply. First, adjudication is proto-democratic in that courts were an early site of constraint on government. Even when judges were required to be loyal servants of the state, they were instructed to “hear the other side” and told not to favor either the rich or the poor. When resolving disputes and sanctioning violations of their laws, rules acknowledged through public rituals of adjudication that something other than pure power legitimated their authority.
Second, democracy changed adjudication. “Rites” turned into “rights,” imposing requirements that governments provide “open and public” hearings and respect the independence of judges. Courts developed alongside the press and the post as mechanisms for the dissemination of knowledge about government. Yet adjudication made a special contribution, offering a space in which ordinary persons gained, momentarily, the ability to call even the government to account. The circle of those eligible to come to court enlarged radically, and the kinds of harms recognized as wrongful multiplied.
Not only did all persons gain rights to equal treatment and dignity; they were also recognized as entitled to occupy all the roles - litigant, witness, lawyer, judge, juror - in courts. The nature of rights changed as well, as whole new bodies of law emerged, restructuring family life, reshaping employee and consumer protections, and recognizing indigenous, civil, and environmental rights. Courts rescaled in local and national contexts to cope with rising filings. Crossing borders, governments came together to create multi-national adjudicatory bodies, from the “Mixed Courts of Egypt” and the Salve Trade Commissions of the nineteenth century to the contemporary regional and international courts, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. The evolving norms reorganizing the roles of the judge and imposing new obligations for courts moved from local to national to regional and trans-national institutions.
Third, both the longevity and the transformation of courts can be seen through tracing the shared political icons of the female Virtue Justice and of buildings called courthouses. Looking at the evolution and changing configurations of places designated courts enables one to map dramatic shifts in the scope and ambitions of governments. Over time Justice became a symbol of government and courts an obligation of governance. Further, as everyone became entitled to use courts, conflicts emerged about how to personify Justice, what “she” should look like, and what symbols deserved places of honor.
Fourth, democracy has not only changed courts but also challenges them profoundly. Most governments do not adequately fund their justice systems to make good on promises of equal justice before the law. Contemporary responses depend on various modes of privatization, including reconfiguration of court-based processes to manage and settle disputes outside the public purview, devolution of fact-finding to agencies and tribunals where judges are less visible and independent and the processes less public, and diversion of decision-making to private arbitration and mediation. These incursions are masked by a spate of courthouse building projects creating architecturally important structure that are, in some respects, distant from the needs for adjudication and the daily activities of judges. Most of the new courthouses, often clad in class to mark justice’s transparency, celebrate courts without reflecting on the problems of access, injustice, opacity and the complexity of rendering judgments.
Fifth, the movement away from public adjudication is a problem for democracies because adjudication is a problem for democracies because adjudication has important contributions to make to democracy. Adjudication is itself a democratic process, which reconfigures power as it obliges disputants and judges to treat each other as equals, to provide information to each other, and to offer public justifications for decisions based on the interaction of fact and norm. Thus Jeremy Bentham’s insistence on “publicity,” Jurgen Habermas’s interest in the “public sphere,” and Michel Foucault’s understanding of the power of surveillance inform our thesis of distinct power for courts in producing, redistributing and curbing power.
Sixth, courts as we know them today are recent inventions. The possibility offered - of what Nancy Fraser has called “participatory parity” - is an outgrowth of social movements pressing governments to treat all persons with dignity and accord them equal status under law. Yes, while monumental in ambition and often in physical girth, the durability of courts as active sites of public exchange before independent judges out not to be taken for granted. Like other venerable institutions of the eighteenth century - the postal service and the press - courts face serious challenges in the twenty-first.
Our task is to document these six claims. In this book, we trace the imagery that became the political iconography of town halls as well as the elaboration of purpose-built structures that came to be called courthouses. We move across oceans and ideas to map the emergence of rights that shifted the paradigm of legitimacy for governments. From the eighteenth through the twentieth-first centuries, interactions among lawyers, architects, judges, and government administrators captured political commitments and economic support for courthouses. We illustrate these phenomena through sketches of the development of courts in the United States, of major building projects in France, Israel, Finland, and a few other countries, and of the regional and international courts of the Americas, Europe and the United Nations. After examining transnational efforts to develop alternatives to adjudication, we turn to the future of courts, which occupies the final segment of the book. Drawing on examples from South Africa, Mexico, Australia, and Minnesota, we provide images of what a democratic iconography of justice - struggling to deal with failures and challenges as well as authority - could entail.
Book Talk discussion on “Representing Justice”. A fascinating and ambitious study of the iconography of justice and what it reveals about attitudes towards a just society, impartiality and authority, from the Renaissance to the Mexican Muralists.
“Representing Justice is a fascinating and ambitious study of the iconography of justice and what it reveals about attitudes towards a just society, impartiality and authority, from the Renaissance to the Mexican Muralists. In this engaging and eminently readable book, the authors show how emblems, icons and courthouses vividly embody the fundamentally democratic process of adjudication.”—Ruth Weisberg, Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California
“How did a blindfolded lady holding scales became the ubiquitous image of justice? How have designs and decorations of spaces defined and redefined adjudication? Assembling monumental research, Resnik and Curtis powerfully show how images and buildings reflect and shape local and international justice across human history and how privatized dispute resolution, security concerns, and diminishing community participation erode the ideal and reality of courts” justice.”—Martha Minow, Dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor, Harvard Law School
“In this visually stunning and provocative book, Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis lead us to think in new ways about justice as symbol, justice as reality, and the connections as well as the distance between the two.”—Linda Greenhouse, Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School
“This is a profoundly original and rich book. By looking at the public iconography of justice the book maps the evolution of courts and their relationship with public power and democracy as it has never been done. In this instance, an image is indeed worth a thousand words. Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis offer us the images and articulate the words.”—Miguel Poiares Maduro, Professor and Director of the Global Governance Programme European, University Institute Villa La Pagliaiuola
“This book is a richly documented study of the iconography of Justice, from Antiquity through its medieval personification as a Cardinal Virtue to the emergence of her figure as an independent icon of a social value. Tracing the continuing resonance of that figure to the modern court room and in the public imagination, Representing Justice demonstrates the power of an image to embody ideals and, when those ideals are ignored, to stand as an indictment of injustice.”—David Rosand, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History Emeritus, Columbia University
“The scope of the book is breathtaking. Through the iconography of justice, Resnik and Curtis chart the history of courts and public justice and compellingly make the case for the central role of adjudication to democracy. The combination of haunting and often visceral imagery with powerful analysis makes the book both a joy to read and an inspiration.” —Dame Hazel Genn, Dean of the Faculty of Laws, University College London (UCL).
“Resnik and Curtis provide a stunning tour of the iconography and architecture of justice. Bristling with insights and steeped in learning, Representing Justice casts the relationship of democracy, justice and law in an entirely new light. Both gripping narrative and deep meditation, there is no other book remotely like it.” —Nancy Fraser, Henry A. & Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social Research
“This is an extraordinary book. It combines iconography of justice and claims about judges, courts and democracy. With a deep sense of art and law, the reader is guided through the comparative history of judging, courts and their role in society as manifested through the history of art and architecture. The book is a glorious proof that when judges sit at trial they stand on trial.” —Aharon Barak, Former Chief Justice of Israel
Book Talk discussion on “Representing Justice”. A fascinating and ambitious study of the iconography of justice and what it reveals about attitudes towards a just society, impartiality and authority, from the Renaissance to the Mexican Muralists.
