Saying Things Without Words: The Meaning of Legal Spaces
Traditional courthouse design is somewhat at odds with current notions of transparency, justice-as-fairness and inclusion.
July 13, 2020 at 06:33 PM
6 minute read
Public statues—in their ubiquity when coupled with the human tendency to habituate the familiar—are as consciously unnoticed as individual trees. But that doesn't mean that they don't mean anything. This summer, sculptures of Confederate officers, slaveholding founders, long-dead public figures who expressed racist views, Old World explorers, and—in proof that all movements have absurdities at the margins—Melania Trump have been pulled down or defaced (or, in the case of Trump's Slovenian wood-carving, burned).
Does a sculpture of Robert E. Lee represent "history" or idealize and sanitize "oppression"? Does a sculpture of Christopher Columbus represent a point of pride for Italian Americans or an affront to Native Americans? Both? Or even more?
I can't hope to resolve the dispute, but it does offer us a springboard into a topic that has attracted my interest of late—namely, the way that courthouses and courtrooms mean. For instance, the manuscript of my new book project, "Everyday Lawyering: Where Imagination and Morality Meet Advocacy and Logic," is currently under review at a university press. A large section of the book considers law-as-performance, which, in part, examines the spaces in which legal performances take place: trials in courtrooms. By this, I "mean" nothing more than that legal spaces transmit messages to us without using words.
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