The Crafting of Law and the Coining of Culture: Legal Semiotic of the American Quarter

Abstract

As emblematic productions of folk legality, coins are significant in viewing the constitutive relationship between law and politics. Additionally, images on coined money legally manipulate our American cultural historical recollection. The harsh historical reality of the United States in terms of racial violence, imperialist conquest, and the elimination of native peoples is dim against picturesque images of palm trees, Magnolia blossoms, and sailboats. Because these historical controversies legally and socially shape who we culturally are today, that which is valued and semiotically crafted by law should reflect these important and defining struggles in American history. Legal images that appear on coins are visual connections to an American legacy of confronting injustice that is omitted by the bucolic and innocently trivial legal depictions of American history that these coinage programs promote. In this article, I consider the ways in which coined images represent a visual crafting of law through which political memory is selectively depicted. Through a legal semiotics framework of symbolic articulation and analysis, I assert that the coinage issued under the United States Department of the Treasury’s Coinage Programs since 1999 depicts the politicization of folk art as a type of legal currency that illustrates and memorializes a nationalistic cultural identity. Here, coins literally become specialized portrayals of American history in which discrimination, conquest, and injustice are intentionally visually unrepresented in favor of pictures of trees, animals, mountains, and even fruit. Through such legislation as The 50 States Commemorative Coin Program Act of 1997 [Public Law 105-124], The Native American $1 Coin Act of 2007 [Public Law 110-82], and The District of Columbia and United States Territories Quarters Program under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 [H.R. 2764], coins are being issued as legal statements of who we as Americans are and where we have come from.