Emblems Performing Law

Abstract

The close relationship between the theatre and the courtroom is a commonplace visual trope. In both spaces, discourse becomes spectacle, speech is performative, narrative is subjective, and scenography is essential. Julie Stone Peters’ book Law as Performance articulates the long history of Justice’s theatricality, through a detailed examination of legal verisimilitude. Does this theatricalization, which is often outrageous, lead to a travesty of the judicial ritual? While the very raison d‘être of the judicial institution is to produce images, these images have different roles, uses, and regimes, which the following contribution sets out to address. The subject matter of Law as Performance lies at the crossroads of several different methodological approaches, particularly centering judicial language analysis. This paper will discuss the ways in which visual sources are treated; the oft-quoted adage “justice is not merely to be done but must be seen to be done” leads to the longue durée analysis of the trope of law as theatre.