Representing Canadian Justice: The Iconography and Symbolism of the Supreme Court of Canada

Abstract

The goal of this paper would be to bridge the world of artistic and architectural representations of the law, primarily in the form of the constitutional court houses, and the legal cultures and constitutional traditions that inspire their design. I will proceed by undertaking a comprehensive research of the Supreme Court of Canada, including its history, esthetics, architectural and design innovations, personal input of the architects, social and historical contexts, as well as some of the legal and constitutional concepts that they embody. The assumption of my hypothesis being constitutional court houses, with their often impressive artistic details and inscribed legal maxims, seem to possess a quasi-religious significance, being an extension of what has become in many societies, especially developed liberal democracies with strong rule-of-law traditions, the secular approximation of a religious institution and, thus, the courts are transformed into a kind of temple of law. However, the challenge of creating a courthouse, especially the Supreme Court of Canada, that reflects the legal traditions and social norms (the former often being in conflict with the latter) as well as the ever evolving aspirations of a dynamic and highly diverse, pluralistic society such as Canada’s is, in many respects, an impossible one, and it remains an open question whether the image that the court conveys to the visitor, is ,as Gournay & Vanlaethem state in their essay, the most “eloquent three dimensional representation of the role the Supreme Court has assumed in the life of the nation.”