Book Review, the Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law and Justice in Context, From the Middle Ages to the First World War, Edited by Stefan Huyge-Baert, Georges Martyn, Vanessa Paumen, Eric Bousmar and Xavier Rousseaux, Cham, Springer, 2018

Abstract

This book review addresses how visual culture reflects legal norms. The volume is ambitious in its scope. Readers will learn a great deal about the history of iconography associated with law but less about the translocal political and social forces that render ‘Justice’ legible, that built impressive structures, and that pressed certain narratives into enduring public consciousness. Furthermore, the haunting question addressed by some, but not all, of the authors remains: how to think about the continued legibility of much of this imagery given that social movements have transformed adjudication into a practice embedded in democracies and, in many countries, have produced courthouses as an icon not only of adjudication but also of government more generally?