Off Her Throne and Unarmed: the Humble, yet Noble Visage of Justice and Her Restless Servants

Abstract

Abstract The title should not sound too iconoclastic to jurists’ ears. At least not to expert procedural lawyers, mindful of the scholarly debate on the notion of justice and the goal of process (especially of civil process) arose in Germany and Italy, at the end of the nineteenth century. As the raising demand for jurisdictional performance posed new challenges to the judicial administration of those States, scholars were confronted with issues such as “unjust” decisions, the perpetuation of judicial mistakes in res judicata judgments, and the principle of party disposition in the choice of appealing wrong decisions. Such a profound and introspective debate, came to put into question even centuries old dogmas, such as the olden maxim “res judicata pro veritate habetur.” Following that foundational juridical debate, the conventional “tools” the female figure of Justice is often displayed with, be they depicted in a XV century engraving or in a XX century sculpture outside a courthouse, A remarkable, though too partial attempt to collect images of Justice from law books printed between 1497 and 1788, may be found in Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale: Yale University Press, 2011). The authors rather focus on a “political” detail – whether Justice is shown as blindfolded or not – which, at different times, was meant either as a critique of arbitrary justice or as a symbol of Justice’s impartiality. do appear to modern observers as nothing but misleading attributes of Justice. In this article, we propose to enquire into the origins of the conceptual trompe l’oeuil attached to the iconographic imagery of Justice; to demonstrate how the widespread representation of Justice in figurative arts is ultimately flawed by political overtones and distant from the truly essence of the jurisdictional phenomenon; and to show how a few exceptions of artworks and famous literary trials come much closer to grasping the essence of Justice through due process, and are way more instructive than its deified and standardized allegory.