lady justice essay

Lady Justice – Symbolism and Meaning

History of lady justice, symbols of lady justice, other depictions of lady justice, wrapping up.

One of the most prominent figures and allegorical personifications to ever exist is Lady Justice, the supposed moral compass across all judicial systems. Almost all high courts in the world feature a sculpture of Lady Justice, distinguished by the many symbolic insignia she wears and carries.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the origins of Lady Justice and the meanings behind the symbols she’s featured with.

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of Lady Justice did not come from just one culture or civilization. It actually dates to the time of Ancient Greece and Egypt.

For Greeks, there was Themis , the Greek goddess of justice, law, order, and good counsel. Themis uses the scales of justice to always remain balanced and pragmatic. However, Themis literally translates to divine law and order, instead of human ordinance.

Meanwhile, Ancient Egyptians had Ma’at of the Old Kingdom, who represented order and justice carried with her a sword and the Feather of Truth . Egyptians believed that this feather (usually depicted as an ostrich feather) would be weighed against the heart of the soul of the deceased to determine whether or not he or she could pass through the afterlife.

However, the modern concept of Lady Justice is most similar to the Roman goddess Justitia. Justitia has become the ultimate symbol of justice in Western civilization. But she is not the Roman counterpart of Themis. Instead, Justitia’s Greek counterpart is Dike , who is Themis’ daughter.

In Roman art, Justitia is often depicted with the sword and scales alongside her sister Prudentia who holds a mirror and a snake.

Below is a list of the editor’s top picks featuring the Lady Justice.

Veronese Design Lady Justice Greek Goddess Resin Hand Painted Miniature Figurine

There may be more than one version or depiction of Lady Justice, but there are four elements that are almost always present in her statues:

In ancient times, a guilty verdict was executed with a literal swing of the sword on the neck of the accused. The symbolism is thus used to convey the idea that justice, when enforced, should be swift and with finality.

Swords likewise symbolize authority and respect, denoting that justice stands by its every ruling and decision. However, notice that Lady Justice’s sword is unsheathed, meaning justice is always transparent and is never just an implement of fear.

The double-edged blade of Lady Justice’s sword signifies that rulings can always go either way, depending on the circumstance and evidence presented by both parties.

The Blindfold

Originally, Lady Justice was depicted without any impediments to her sight. In the 16th century, though, artists started rendering the woman as blind, or with blindfolds covering her eyes.

This is a poignant symbolism depicting objectivity and impartiality – an assurance that anyone who approaches the court to seek justice will not be judged for their appearance, power, status, fame, or wealth, but solely for the strength of the claims/evidence they are presenting.

The Weighing Scale

Without her sight, the only way Lady Justice can decide is through a thorough weighing of the evidence and claims presented before her. Everything, including what the law states and what jurisprudence dictates, should be carefully and accurately weighed in order to find the most justiciable decision. This is what the balance scales depict in the imagery of Lady Justice.

The fact that the scales hang freely from Lady Justice’s grasp is symbolic of the fact that evidence should stand on its own without tangible foundation on speculation, whatsoever.

Just like the laurel wreath that usually accompanies Lady Justice in drawn, printed, or virtual renderings, her toga outfit is used to signify the mantle of responsibility and high-level philosophy that accompanies those who practice law and enforce justice.

While it is common to see Lady Justice wearing a toga and a blindfold while holding scales and a sword in either hands, that is not the only way she is depicted.

Romans have depicted Justitia on coins with a royal crown or diadem . Another coin design shows her seated while carrying an olive twig, which Romans believe she brought to their country.

Some depictions of Lady Justice also show her seated on a throne while holding two plates in each hand, symbolizing that she can be the actual personification of justice.

And sometimes, Lady Justice is shown to be crushing a snake underfoot, with the reptile being a common symbol for evil.

All in all, Lady Justice statues and drawings have been placed in almost every courtroom around the world to remind us to practice good judgment and reason in accordance with the law. As the personification of justice, it becomes the ultimate symbol of impartiality and fairness that apply to everyone regardless of power, religion, race, and stature.

Tags: Greek Symbols

Dani Rhys has worked as a writer and editor for over 15 years. She holds a Masters degree in Linguistics and Education, and has also studied Political Science, Ancient History and Literature. She has a wide range of interests ranging from ancient cultures and mythology to Harry Potter and gardening. She works as the chief editor of Symbol Sage but also takes the time to write on topics that interest her.

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These Women Used the Rule of Law to Challenge Trumpism

In “Lady Justice,” Dahlia Lithwick celebrates the female lawyers, judges and others who stood up to the administration.

By Julie C. Suk

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LADY JUSTICE: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America, by Dahlia Lithwick

In 1873, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that women had no constitutional right to practice law. Indeed, as Dahlia Lithwick notes in this stirring book, a justice explained that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” But, in reaction, women mobilized to change the laws — and, ultimately, to become lawyers themselves.

“Lady Justice” focuses specifically on the women who, since the election of 2016, have mobilized against Trumpism and its threats to the rule of law. Combining biography and analysis, Lithwick — a lawyer and writer who covers legal matters for Slate — profiles several members of the profession who may not yet be household names, but who have, in her view, done real work to save American democracy. From Sally Yates and Becca Heller, who fought against the travel ban on Muslim-majority nations in the earliest days of Trump’s presidency, to Brigitte Amiri and Vanita Gupta, two women of immigrant backgrounds who resisted, among other things, the president’s efforts to prevent abortions and separate families at the U.S.-Mexico border, “Lady Justice” illustrates how “in a constitutional democracy, enduring power lies in the people who step into the fight.” Lithwick’s approach, interweaving interviews with legal commentary, allows her subjects to shine. She unabashedly casts them as heroines with the tenacity and courage to resist governmental pressure at crucial moments, but at the same time she rejects a simplistic, naïve narrative of social progress.

Attempting to redress a historical record that routinely denied women credit for their contributions to law, Lithwick notes that “change doesn’t result exclusively from the biographies of a Guy in a Hat Who Did a Thing.” This book, she explains, is not just the story of these people, but one about “timeless constitutional values: dignity, equality, justice, law, truth and reason.” And yet, by the book’s conclusion, the narrative is complicated; chapters that bring us to the present day reveal a reluctant but palpable doubt as to whether American constitutional democracy will, in fact, ultimately empower women.

The subjects of this book were drawn to their profession because law has an inherent logic and structure that can, in theory, achieve justice even in the absence of “brute power.” Lawyers, led by Heller, could show up at airports to find plaintiffs detained under the travel ban, and then file lawsuits invoking the Constitution. After white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, litigators like Robbie Kaplan could invoke the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 on behalf of those injured by the violence, and in so doing stop the perpetrators from continuing campaigns of terror after the march. When the Trump administration tried to stop a pregnant teenager in immigration detention from obtaining an abortion, Amiri could file an emergency petition relying on established constitutional law to restrain the government from preventing the procedure.

These lawyers did not see themselves as radicals; they were working with longstanding institutions and reasoning within frameworks that date to the 18th and 19th centuries. Their faith in our Constitution and our legal system enabled the protection of the powerless.

The narrative’s confidence in those values wavers somewhat in the chapters about the women, including Lithwick herself, who accused the legal profession’s most powerful men of abusive sexual behavior. In 2017, a woman who had formerly clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — known for his spectacular opinions and for sending his clerks on to Supreme Court clerkships — alleged that her boss had shown her pornographic images in his chambers and asked if they turned her on. Another woman who had clerked in the same building reported that Judge Kozinski, in response to her comment that she liked exercising when nobody else was around, had suggested that she work out in the courthouse gym naked.

These two were willing to be named, but others shared similar stories of Kozinski’s behavior without publicly revealing their identities. By their account, all of them felt demeaned and diminished by his conduct. Lithwick, who had clerked for another judge on the Ninth Circuit in 1996, had kept secret her own inappropriate encounters with Kozinski, but, inspired by the upswell of #MeToo, finally wrote about the experience in 2017. Shortly thereafter, Kozinski resigned a judgeship that the Constitution allowed him to keep for life.

In the book’s most poignant moment, Lithwick confronts her own complicity in enabling Kozinski’s continued abuses. For most of his nearly four decades as one of the most powerful judges in the country, she and many other women had known about the ways in which he made young women lawyers feel powerless; indeed, many female law students simply did not apply for clerkships in his chambers, despite knowing it was a proven path to the Supreme Court. (Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Judge Kozinski, then for Justice Anthony Kennedy.)

Women like Lithwick stayed publicly silent, she writes, not only out of fear of career-ending retaliation, but also out of a desire for the career-advancing benefits of playing along: “I’d been allowed to meet Supreme Court justices and to attend fancy parties and had done my fair share of junkets and prestigious events, some of them sitting next to Judge Kozinski himself, largely because I understood the drill: Men were men.” The drill, she now realizes, is that women bought their power with their silence. “I’d kept my own Kozinski story to myself for more than two decades,” Lithwick confesses, because “everyone understands that keeping secrets is part of the bargain.”

Lithwick then offers admiring but sobering portraits of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, the women who accused Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh of inappropriate — or abusive — behavior during their Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Within the judicial appointments process required by the Constitution, even the bravest women, willing to speak up at great personal cost, could not stop the Senate from empowering these men.

As justices, Thomas and Kavanaugh recently cast two of the votes it took for the Supreme Court to end women’s constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies. And, although the lawyers featured in earlier chapters fought Trump’s travel ban with some initial success, five men on the Supreme Court refused to see it as discrimination against Muslims and exercised their power to legitimize the ban.

6 Paperbacks to Read This Week

As autumn approaches, grab a warm beverage and take a pick from our latest roundup, which includes Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished interwar novel, a historical critique of white feminism and a look at how the world’s constitutions came to be.

Here are six paperbacks we recommend this week →

INSEPARABLE, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Sandra Smith.

Originally written in 1954, this previously unpublished novel is based largely on the author’s relationship with a late childhood friend “through whose mirror she sought to loosen the silken chains binding them both to outdated ideals of femininity,” our reviewer, Leslie Camhi, wrote.

A PLAY FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, by Jai Chakrabarti.

Inspired by a 1942 performance of a Tagore play in a Warsaw ghetto orphanage, this novel follows a Polish immigrant in 1972 New York who retrieves a friend’s ashes in India, where he is swept up in the production of a play he’d performed as a child.

AGAINST WHITE FEMINISM: Notes on Disruption, by Rafia Zakaria.

Making a case for a global, intersectional approach to gender politics, Zakaria methodically dismantles Western feminism and its individualist and exclusionary roots by drawing on examples of discriminatory aid organizations, the writings of Audre Lorde and more.

THE GUN, THE SHIP, AND THE PEN: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World, by Linda Colley.

An eminent British historian examines the forces that paved the way for the proliferation of constitutions across the West during the 18th century, from wars and revolutions to advancements in communication and globalization.

PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS: Reports From a Haunted Present, by Dara Horn.

The 12 essays in this collection explore how Jewish tragedy is commemorated by the media, museums and literature in ways that are comforting distractions from “the very concrete, specific death of Jews,” as our reviewer, Yaniv Iczkovits, noted.

THE RECIPE FOR REVOLUTION, by Carolyn Chute.

Chute’s third novel to take place in the world of the Settlement, a farm cooperative in rural Maine that is home to the economically hopeless, retains a nontraditional plot where characters slowly emerge and recede while the author meditates on reality, humanity and capitalism.

Published on September 16.

This week’s Substack essay – About Lady Justice

14th February 2023

You can also read last week’s essay, on the case of Jane Wenham and the last of the English witch trials .

Other essays include (in chronological order of the subject):

Dr Bonham’s case (1610) – and the question of whether parliament is really sovereign

Taff Vale (1901) – perhaps the most important case in trade union history

Wednesbury (1948) – the origin of the modern principle of legal unreasonableness

Malone (1979 ) – perhaps the most significant constitutional case of the last 50 years

These essays for paying subscribers are in addition to my free-to-read, topical law and policy commentary every weekday.

These essays are also crossposted on my Patreon .

And anyone who has supported my blog on Patreon, or on Paypal in 2022, can have a free one year subscription to my Substack – just leave a comment below marked private with your preferred email address.

It is important that nobody pays “twice” for my drivel.

"A decision so unreasonable that not reasonable authority could have come to it" @davidallengreen has always been compulsory reading for anybody interested in law. At this rate, his Substack will deliver a de-facto law degree by itself. Incredible work. https://t.co/tr9lFfHapm pic.twitter.com/9kmKbvVK6F — The Secret Barrister (@BarristerSecret) January 15, 2023

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9 thoughts on “This week’s Substack essay – About Lady Justice”

I can’t leave a comment over there, but to do justice (ha!) to this sort of topic, you might want to look at depictions of Maat (with her feather), and Themis (and Dike) and Nemesis, and Justitia (a consciously invented Roman goddess, often depicted on early coins seated with a sceptre and patera) and Aequitas (that is, the Roman goddess of equity paralleling law, with scales and cornucopia), and then, jumping forward about 1500 years to the Renaissance, the impact of Cesare Ripa’s “Iconologia”. You’ve also drawn the clear parallel with Saint Michael.

I’ve seen it suggested that the blindfold started as an addition by Durer, as a satirical comment on the lack of justice enacted in her name.

It seems to me that the modern depiction of “Lady Justice” is an amalgam of these historical traditions.

I am fully aware of them, as I hope would have been indicated by the references! But there is only so much that can be put in a readable post – and the objective of the essays is not to show off the extent of my knowledge and research, but to provide something interesting for others to read and think about.

(And if you look carefully, you will see Maat I think in one of the illustrations.)

The blindfold does puzzle me and, as you suggest, Lady Justice is now an amalgam.

No criticism intended: more scratching my own itch to understand context. And I agree, the trick is often knowing when to stop.

For the readers at home, here is a typical coin showing Justitia (no sword, or scales, or blindfold): * https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_THO-II-1344 And one showing Aequitas (scales, perhaps to measure out equally the fruits of her cornucopia): * https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1896-0608-57

It may be just my own ignorance, but I find it fascinating to discover that the Romans already had “law” and “equity” as parallel concepts.

Here is the image from the 1494 “Ship of Fools” (Narrenschiff) attributed to Durer that seems to have introduced the blindfold, although I’d be interested to see an earlier example: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:D%C3%BCrer_-_Das_Narrenschiff_002.jpg

And an illustration of “Justice” from an edition of Ripa from 1610: * https://archive.org/details/nouaiconologia00ripa/page/222/mode/1up Interestingly, the sword is an attribute of “injustice.” * https://archive.org/details/nouaiconologia00ripa/page/258/mode/1up

Your Egyptian image shows Anubis weighing a dead person’s heart against Maat’s feather, but not Maat herself as far as I can see. Images of the judgment scene from the Book of the Dead – the weighing of the heart – are pretty variable, but here is an example with dozens of feather-wielding gods, and a feather-headed goddess on the far right: * https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA10479-6 Perhaps the deceased was a lawyer.

And for St Michael, you have this sort of thing in the 12th century: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BL_Harley_624,_f._134v_-_Michael_and_the_dragon.jpg Which becomes this sort of thing by the early 1300s * https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/object/635

That is probably more than enough, so I’ll stop there :)

As with all things, Andrew, getting the right balance is good :-)

David and Andrew, I enjoyed the whole panoply provided by the two of you. Before the full blog I had started researching statues and paintings myself. I didn’t know Old Lady Bailey had holes in her scales. I particularly liked the Middlesbrough lot and the same sex embrace of the Statue of Liberty! Blindness is altogether a fascinating topic – King Lear, H G Wells, the Country of the Blind, etc.

Andrew, I can’t work out why one of your Justices has a frog (or toad) in her left hand.

I fear that is Ripa’s personification of “Injustice” (Ingiustitia) with a toad (rospo) in her left hand.

My Italian is not quite good enough for a proper translation, but I think the text describes are several different types of “Justice” (Giustitia). The illustration shows one with a crown, but elsewhere I see references to a blindfold (occhi bentati) and a sword (spada) and scales (bilancie or bilancia).

Sorry, that should be “occhi bendati”. I told you my Italian was not so good. :)

Thank you. I was trying to see it on my too-small mobile. I hadn’t spotted “Ingiustitia” or “rospo”. Many years ago I was fluent in Italian. I can still make out that her stained white clothing shows not just injustice but corruption and a stained soul from overturning law which is why the scales are trampled under her feet. There’s also something about only seeing properly with her left eye, the one looking at the toad.

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Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, tells the gripping and heroic story of the women lawyers who fought the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Donald Trump’s presidency—and won

After the sudden shock of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, many Americans felt lost and uncertain. It was clear he and his administration were going to pursue a series of retrograde, devastating policies. What could be done? Immediately, women lawyers all around the country, independently of each other, sprang into action, and they had a common goal: they weren’t going to stand by in the face of injustice, while Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican party did everything in their power to remake the judiciary in their own conservative image. Over the next four years, the women worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic and malign presidency in living memory. There was Sally Yates, the acting attorney general of the United States, who refused to sign off on the Muslim travel ban. And Becca Heller, the founder of a refugee assistance program who brought the fight over the travel ban to the airports. And Roberta Kaplan, the famed commercial litigator, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. And, of course, Stacey Abrams, whose efforts to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians may well have been what won the Senate for the Democrats in 2020. These are just a handful of the stories Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail to tell a brand-new and deeply inspiring account of the Trump years. With unparalleled access to her subjects, she has written a luminous book, not about the villains of the Trump years, but about the heroes. And as the country confronts the news that the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, will soon overturn Roe v. Wade , Lithwick shines a light on not only the major consequences of such a decision, but issues a clarion call to all who might, like the women in this book, feel the urgency to join the fight. A celebration of the tireless efforts, legal ingenuity, and indefatigable spirit of the women whose work all too often went unrecognized at the time, Lady Justice is destined to be treasured and passed from hand to hand for generations to come, not just among lawyers and law students, but among all optimistic and hopeful Americans.

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Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice” Essay

About artist/artworks, general description of the art, its meaning/concept/ style, why i liked this piece of art, the way i made sense of this art form, changes my judgments after the class.

The artistic picture I have chosen for analyzing and judgment is ‘The lady justice’ who is taking revenge on the cruel dragon. The picture shown for the viewers is the end of one good story. A woman has been projected in the picture. She resembles two types of actions one is of motherhood and the other is of god-like actions in which she is ready to take some actions. There is no bewilderment in saying that the work is a creative one.

The picture has got its own beauty and it is eye-catching. I like this artwork very much as this resembles beauty, meaning, and style. The picture has got a very good story in it that has been taken place a long time ago. The story is like this. There lived a beautiful girl in the village. She is so beautiful that her beauty can be described as a moon present in the sky without any clouds or just as the sun comes up on a rainy day. Also, she could find the truth in everyone’s eyes. The girl was underage and her beauty is so attractive for everyone and everyone living in the village wants her to be their own wife. But there lived a dragon in the village that needs to destroy everything. Twice this dragon presented in front of the beautiful girl. Dragon made beautiful girl blind by becoming angry without knowing she is the daughter of the greatest goddess. The goddess told her daughter to take revenge on the dragon, which made her blind.

Telling about this picture, this work of art or painting has got its own beauty whose beauty never ends in explaining. The girl presented in the picture is aged in her early twenties. She is very tall in a standing position. Her waist presented in the picture is slightly tilted to the right side. Her left legs are positioned on the top of the Chinese dragon. Her skin is shown as in normal brown color. Part of her skin is covered with protective metal, which is of silver color, which can be called armor. The bust of armor protects her breast and armor is presented to her waist. An angelic being is sleeping in the middle of her armor, which gives some extra beauty to her armor. A chemise which is of silky silver has been shown underneath the armor. This chemise covers her shoulders also. It seems to be a ribbon presented on top of the shoulders. Her legs are covered with a long skirt, which is of silver color. But her left leg is shown as exposed which is placed on the Chinese dragon. She has got long curly hair. In the middle of her forehead, curly bangs are presented which adds extra beauty to the picture. Another feature of this picture is her eyes are covered with a bronze blindfold. Her facial expression is shown as very peaceful full and she smiles very slightly. Two weighing scales are carried own her right which is of perfectly balanced. At the same time, she carries sword in her left hand. The tip of sword is pointed downwards. The sword, which is carried in left hand, is made up of bronze. Other than sword and scales no other jewelry has been there in her body. Another extraordinary feature of this picture is there is no hesitation has been presented in her face.

This picture has got very good meaning, concept and style in it. What the picture tells us about the audience is that no one should harm any one without any reason. Here in this dragon being one of the cruelest is wanted to attack beautiful lady of the village unknowing the fact that she is the daughter of the goddess and she is having numerous talent in built in her. Dragon made her blind so goddess became angry and told her to finish of the dragon. This is the real meaning, concept and style of the picture.

There is no doubt that it is an art. It resembles meaning in this art work. Also it gives some information regarding beauty of young woman and the Chinese dragon. The meaning of art work will change with the location, place and characteristics of the viewer. By looking at the picture, it is not necessary that everyone will think about the picture with the same imagination. If one really knows the story well beauty of the picture will increases.

I liked this piece of art very much because it has got very good meaning in it. That is a young lady taking revenge on the dragon. It is because dragon has done so many difficulties to the young lady and even dragon makes her blind. So story tells us a lesson that evil deeds must be punished.

This is very nice art form as young lady described in this has been shown in a splendid form. Many different colors have been used to illustrate the young lady. The posture of the lady shown to take revenge on dragon has been very good from top to bottom. Artist has given each part of the picture their own importance. The armor, chemise, skirt, hair, blindfold added something extra to the art form. The facial expression of the young lady without having any kind of hesitation in her face of the daunting task is one of the best parts of the picture.

I could find different kinds of elements used by the artist to bring his view about the world and human race. But, painting as an art form needs good study of its certain techniques and other old and new works to analyze systematically. The classes about the art of painting have changed many of my views towards this work.

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IvyPanda. (2021, December 9). Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/judgment-and-social-interaction-in-the-lady-justice/

"Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”." IvyPanda , 9 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/judgment-and-social-interaction-in-the-lady-justice/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”'. 9 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”." December 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/judgment-and-social-interaction-in-the-lady-justice/.

1. IvyPanda . "Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”." December 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/judgment-and-social-interaction-in-the-lady-justice/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”." December 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/judgment-and-social-interaction-in-the-lady-justice/.

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The History of Lady Justice and the Scales of Justice

Lady Justice holding the Scales of Justice is one of the most, if not the most, recognizable symbols in the legal system. The statue of Lady Justice holding the Scales of Justice demonstrates an aura of fairness, opportunity and, as you can imagine, justice. In fact, Lady Justice, or a version of it, is not only common to the United States, but is a familiar symbol for multiple countries across the world.

Lady Justice can be traced all the way back to the Egyptian goddess Maat (or Ma’at) and the ancient Greek goddesses Themis and Dike (or Dice). This should come to no surprise as Maat symbolized Egyptian ideologies of balance, harmony, justice, law and order; Themis represented fairness, law and order; and Dike embodied fair judgment and moral order. Since then, a version of Lady of Justice hoisting the Scales of Justice can be seen in various alterations in numerous countries.

Now, although Lady Justice statues may vary, the one characterization of Lady Justice that most are familiar with has three distinct features: a blindfold, the scales of justice and a sword. As one can imagine, these characteristics represent important ideas and values.

To start, the blindfold over Lady Justice’s eyes represents the notion of impartiality. The idea of impartiality is of utmost importance in the legal system as it denotes justice should be applied no matter the circumstances. Next, the Scales of Justice signify that in order for justice to be had the weight of the evidence for and against an issue should be weighed and considered before issuing a ruling. The Scales of Justice go directly to the heart of law and the duty to consider both sides presented. Finally, the sword represents a sense of authority and power and that justice can be administered quickly and in its final manner.

Lady Justice holding the Scales of Justice has been, and will continue to be, an important figure for justice systems all over the world. Its balance of impartiality and process symbolizes how justice can be served. Lady Justice is not only an interesting statue but is a reminder of the ideas and values fundamental to the law.

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How Blind Should Lady Justice Be?

Our society was once devoted to the rule of law rather than the rule of men. A focus on the representativeness of judges will entrench a rule of identity.

It is often argued that the federal judiciary should be representative of the nation, with representativeness defined by race, ethnicity, and gender. President Donald Trump’s nominees were criticized for being too male and too white. By contrast, President Joe Biden has promised more diverse nominees . And some federal judges themselves have argued for this kind of representative judiciary.

But this call raises uncomfortable questions. First, legal decision-making is not supposed to reflect a process by which case outcomes are apportioned representatively or even where the characteristics of the people before the judge should affect the outcome. The icon of justice is blind. Second, even if representativeness were desirable, a focus on race, ethnicity, and gender distorts the diversity of America: Other factors, such as religion and family background, are at least as relevant to what makes an individual representative. Third, appointing with reference to representativeness devalues considerations of quality.

Law and Representativeness

The more formal one’s view of law, the less representativeness should matter to the legitimacy of the judiciary. A formalist believes that the material of written law—the text as understood in the context of rules of interpretation and sometimes supplemented by precedent also applied according to formal rules—generates decisions. Thus, judges have little, if any, policy discretion in reaching decisions. To be sure, there may be easier and harder cases, but there is still no room for personal policy views in deciding them. If legal correctness of a more formal kind is the goal of judging, the focus in judicial appointments should be on the candidates’ legal acumen and legal fidelity, including a fierce determination to put aside irrelevant considerations like race, ethnicity, and gender.

If, on the other hand, judges were policymakers, and race, ethnicity, or gender were proxies for policy views, representativeness, including these factors, might be useful in making sure that the policy reflected a variety of interests. In setting policy, the judiciary is then acting more like a legislature. It follows that representativeness might have more of a role in state courts than federal courts, because state courts have common law responsibilities, such as shaping the law of contracts and torts. At least in the modern view of the common law, these judges do make policy. But federal courts have almost no common law responsibilities, being charged with interpreting constitutional and statutory text.

It also follows that Republicans have a principled reason to reject representativeness as an ideal because they have embraced the formal methods of constitutional and statutory interpretation—originalism and textualism. Democrats, however, oppose these methods. They either believe that they are not possible because written law has large gaps, or that they are not desirable because a formally oriented jurisprudence makes it too hard to change the status quo. One might conclude, therefore, that Democrats have a principled reason to embrace representativeness.

Progressivism and Diversity

But there is a limit to such principled advocacy of representativeness defined in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. First, as discussed below, race, ethnicity, and gender are only a few of the factors that reflect a diverse polity, and progressives are generally unconcerned with any other categories. Second, many if not most progressives count as “diverse” only candidates with progressive views. Democrats opposed many of the female and minority lawyers nominated by Trump just as much as the white males that he nominated. For many progressives, the definition of representativeness is simply instrumental to advancing their political positions.

The connection between politics and representativeness explains the reason that President Biden has announced that he will first nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. On a straightforward representativeness ideal, this decision is odd. African Americans comprise 13 percent of the country and one justice out of nine is African American—a close approximation to the proportion of the population. In contrast, Asian Americans have no representation on the Court and never have.

But Justice Clarence Thomas is not a progressive. He is a formalist and (to use political science terms) the most conservative justice on the Court. He is not infrequently denounced by the left for his apostasy from what is understood to be the view of most African Americans.

If representativeness is an idea impossible to achieve in practice and unattractive in theory, it is at least heartening that the left’s obsession with it will almost certainly undermine their goal of moving the judiciary leftward.

But that complaint underscores yet another problem with representativeness as a concept. Are judges supposed to reflect the median views of their identity group? If so, they must conform to a stereotype. And the requirement of conformity implicit in this ideal of representativeness damages our society, where people of any race, gender, and ethnicity must be free to think for themselves. It also hardens existing fault lines of society by connecting race, ethnicity, and gender to political and ideological differences. Confirmation of this damage came just this week. Amazon has removed a documentary about Justice Thomas from its video collection. It was Black History Month and apparently the only African American justice on the Court was not Black enough to participate.

Who is Representative?

Thinking more broadly, if representativeness is related to policy views, then race, ethnicity, and gender are not the only key considerations. For instance, getting married and having children substantially changes people’s worldviews, including their political views. That fact gave President Trump, a master of political jiu-jitsu, the opportunity to turn representativeness to his advantage when, at her installation as a justice, he touted Amy Coney Barrett as the first woman at the Court who had children at home. Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, in contrast, have never had children, unlike the great majority of women. Does that make them unrepresentative for those who, unlike me, think representativeness should shape judicial appointments?

Religion is also a great shaper of worldviews. On this point, the current Court is very unrepresentative with five practicing Catholics, one non-practicing, one Episcopalian, and two Jews. (Before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death there were three). Catholics and Jews thus are heavily overrepresented. But just as noticeable is the absence of evangelical Protestants who constitute a quarter of the American population. Should appointments take account of judges’ religion?

Social class also affects a person’s views. It is true that most successful lawyers of the kind likely to be appointed to federal courts are at least middle class, but there is still a wide range of wealth and income within that group. Moreover, a person’s perspective is influenced by his or her upbringing. Someone who has risen from poverty is likely to be shaped in part by that experience. If one were really concerned about representativeness, screening lawyers for their social background, regardless of race and ethnicity, would be important, particularly because it has been shown that federal courts often follow elite rather than popular views.

But the larger point is that it is impossible to construct a representative Supreme Court or even a representative circuit court on any fair definition of the representativeness that might matter to policy. The numbers are simply too small. Indeed, focusing on one dimension of representativeness may make a court less representative on a different dimension. Moreover, it is just not the case that the pool of lawyers from which judges are drawn are representative of the population. Like most jobs, the enterprise of law attracts particular groups more than it does others. Jews and people of Irish descent, for instance, continue to be overrepresented, as are the middle and upper-middle classes.

Representativeness and Quality

If representativeness is an idea impossible to achieve in practice and unattractive in theory, it is at least heartening that the left’s obsession with a narrow view of representativeness will almost certainly undermine their goal of moving the judiciary leftward. Selecting on the axis of identity will make it less likely that the best and most articulate champions of progressive jurisprudence will get on the bench.

It is not, of course, that there are no such effective champions among people of all races, ethnicities, and genders. But the process of becoming a federal judge requires running a gauntlet that discourages many even from trying. Only lawyers of a certain experience are eligible. Home-state senators of the President’s own party have influence on nominees for both the district and appellate courts and senators of the other party have influence on the district courts. The process has become so polarized that even writings during college can be deemed disqualifying. Adding yet another screen of representativeness makes it even harder to get the most outstanding nominees. The Trump administration’s nominees to the appellate bench encompassed a very high percentage of Supreme Court clerks. If the goal is to get that level of professional distinction, a singular focus on quality is necessary.

And quality pays dividends in influence. While judges within a circuit hear an equal number of cases, that does not guarantee equal influence. Much of their shaping of the law comes through their opinions—their shifting of precedent and parsing of text. Some opinions are more persuasive than others and thus are cited more, enjoying an outsized effect on fashioning the law for the future.

We have some evidence that the influence may not currently be distributed randomly along the lines of some of the representative factors. One law review article measured the influence of federal appellate judges by a variety of considerations, such as the number of written opinions and citations per opinion by other appellate judges. The judges in the top ten on various measures were uniformly white. Some of the categories did include women in roughly their proportion on the judiciary. Others were all male. But there is no indication that influence will necessarily map onto the factors that make for representativeness at any given time. The best predictor of influence at that time seemed to be academic prominence before taking the bench, with Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook leading the tournament of judges by a substantial measure. Having met both of these distinguished jurists, I would claim that they are representative only of their own towering intellects.

Sadly, however, the focus on the racial, ethnic, and gender identity of judges will not go away. It may well be joined by other identities that are no more relevant to formal judging and no more predictive of a diverse policy outlook than many that are ignored. It was once a commonplace that our society was devoted to the rule of law rather than the rule of men. But a focus on the representativeness of judges will entrench a rule of identity.

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Type: Academic Article
Topic: Culture/Current Events

Published Date: July 31, 1989

William David Spencer

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Lady Justice: The Contribution of Women in Mystery Fiction

Are people sick of reading novels that portray women as either victims or villains? Are Christians fed up with fiction that stereotypes believers as simply helplessly innocent or hopelessly immoral? Is the major, moral, middle-class reader in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain growing weary of nearly exclusively seeing endless images of the sinister minister, churlish “church lady”, and the dishonest deacon? A groundswell of new literature in the mystery genre strongly suggests that such is the case. A part of the counter revolution is the new wave of women writers who have recently begun filling bookstores and libraries with portrayals of powerful Christian detectives, both women and men.

Mystery literature may be traced back to such ancient sources as Bel and the Dragon and Susannah (in the Apocrypha) and Aesop’s fable of the lion and the fox. However, detective fiction as a genre only came to full flowering in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of detection.

Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “Purloined Letter”, “Gold Bug”, and especially, perhaps, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt'” (based, as it was, on a true incident) struck immediate resounding chords in contemporary women writers. Such notable women as Louisa May Alcott began penning thrillers like her anonymously published Behind the Mask. So proficient did women become that from 1878 through the early 1900’s mysteries poured from the quills of Anna Katharine Green, the Baroness Orczy, and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes.

In 1903, a young nurse, Mary Roberts Rinehart, struggling to help her husband surmount a $12,000 stock market loss, turned naturally to mystery fiction. Her success inspired Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Marjorie Allingham, Georgette Heyer. The rise of these and many other outstanding women writers prompted literary critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in their massive annotated index, A Catalogue of Crime, to observe, “The greatest masters of the twenties and thirties were in fact mistresses…They wrote true detection; they fashioned unsurpassable models,”

Why have women found such success in the mystery genre? Leonard Wibberley, author of The Mouse ThaI Roared, who wrote mysteries himself under the pseudonym Leonard Holton, noted:

The dectective stories written by men these days are usually full of tough talk and tense action and casual sex. Women, on the other hand, tend to deal with minutiae of appearance, of habit, of thought, or dress, weather and surroundings; of remarks or absence of remarks. These form a truer but quieter picture of life as life is. As a result women in my view are far superior to men in writing detective fiction.

At the same time, Christians and others of high moral principle have found the mystery a stimulating genre in which to write because it deals with ethical questions of right and wrong. Poet W. H. Auden, in his essay “The Guilty Vicarage”, saw in detective fiction nothing less than the search, through evil, for a return to the pre-Fall state of innocence. He wrote: “The fantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.” Theologian J. I. Packer calls detective tales:

Christian fairy tales, with savior heroes and plots that end in what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe – whereby things come right after seeming to go irrevocably wrong. Villains are foiled, people in jeopardy are freed, justice is done, and the ending is happy…The gospel of Christ is the archetype of all such stories. Paganism unleavened by Christianity, on the other hand, was and always will be pessimistic at heart.

Agreeing, evangelical statesman Roger Nicole notes that mysteries’ appeal is eschatological – they reflect what will finally be true about life:

Mysteries represent a tremendously optimistic outlook on the place of justice in life. In mysteries the guilty are always brought to justice, which is not always the case in life at this level. It will be the case at the last judgement. But at this level there are people who escape the tentacles of the law. But the mystery situation demands there be a sleuth to bring the criminal to justice. That is the thing that is so deeply satisfying. Every time the force of justice wins.

Literary critic Lionel Basney concludes, “The murder mystery witnesses to two moral laws: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and ‘Be sure your sin will find you out.’

Women authors with high moral values, including many believing Christians, writing in the mystery genre have produced powerful images of ordained Christian detectives. From the 1940’s through the 1960’s, a member of the Montana Slate legislature, Margaret Scherf, created Episcopal rector Father Martin Buell, whose gruff approach to pastoring and detecting disguised a gentle and caring heart. Then Margaret Hubbard created the straight-shooting nun, Sister Mary Simon of Sister Simon’s Murder Case, who is as fast with a revolver as with a rosary. And in the 1970’s Edith Pargeter, distinguished historical novelist and award-winning translator of Czechoslovakian poetry, writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Peters, created a delightful detecting monk, Brother Cadfael, herbalist and physician both to the body and to the spirit.

Recently, women have been creating women detectives who are powerful religious leaders as well. Dorothy Gilman, creator of the redoubtable Mrs. Pollifax, espionage agent extraordinaire, introduced two detecting nuns, Sisters John and Hyacinthe, in her mystery A Nun In The Closet. A real nun, Sister Carol Anne O’Marie of the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet, has recently given readers a delightful detecting nun, Sister Mary Helen, as elderly as Christie’s Miss Marple but spry and sardonical. And psychological novelist Isabelle Holland has created the first ordained Protestant female sleuth, the Rev. Dr. Claire Aldington of A Death at St. Anselm’s and A Lover Scorned.

Justice in mythology was a woman lifting fair scales. As a conduit for the searing yet merciful justice of God, the powerful image of a detecting Christian believer, piercing through intermeshing evil to identify sin and bring about retribution and restoration, is a salutary one. It reminds us all by parable of what the Christian task is all about As God’s emissaries, all Christians – women equally with men – can bring the clear vision of justice and the sight of restoration to a groping, evilly-blinded world.

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Should Lady Justice be Blind to Identity When Judges Are Selected? A Response to Professor McGinnis

By Eric Segall

At the Law and Liberty Website last Thursday, Professor John McGinnis of Northwestern University posted an essay about the relationship between judicial nominations, identity, and Lady Justice. McGinnis seems quite troubled by President Biden's pledge to appoint more diverse judges to the federal bench and the "left's obsession" with "representativeness." There is a lot wrong with this essay, which covers numerous broad topics relating to judging but in the interests of time and space I will just point out a few of the more outrageous claims in McGinnis' post.

He begins by pointing out that to legal formalists, the identity of the judge is or should be irrelevant to case outcomes. He says the following:

A formalist believes that the material of written law—the text as understood in the context of rules of interpretation and sometimes supplemented by precedent also applied according to formal rules—generates decisions. Thus, judges have little, if any, policy discretion in reaching decisions. To be sure, there may be easier and harder cases, but there is still no room for personal policy views in deciding them . If legal correctness of a more formal kind is the goal of judging, the focus in judicial appointments should be on the candidates’ legal acumen and legal fidelity, including a fierce determination to put aside irrelevant considerations like race, ethnicity, and gender (emphasis added).

McGinnis concedes that common law judges do make policy, act somewhat like legislators, and therefore "r epresentativeness might have more of a role in state courts than federal courts, because state courts have common law responsibilities.... But federal courts have almost no common law responsibilities, being charged with interpreting constitutional and statutory text."

Most of McGinnis' post relates to the federal judiciary and his arguments that ethnic and gender identity should have no role in federal judicial nominations. But his descriptive account of what federal judges do and do not do is riddled with absurdity. Federal judges, especially court of appeals judges and Supreme Court justices, make policy and do not just decide cases based on prior written law.

Readers of this blog are probably all too familiar with my legal realist arguments along these lines but it should be obvious that, at least as a descriptive matter, text and other legal materials do not generate either Supreme Court decisions or appellate opinions where there is no binding Supreme Court precedent. As I've written before , text barely matters at all to the Supreme Court, as evidenced by the Justices' robust non-textual limitations on Congress, such as the anti-commandeering doctrine , Shelby County's infamous equal state sovereignty principle , the Court's Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence , and on the other side of the political ledger, the Court's made up federal equal protection clause . Moreover, the Court's convoluted first amendment jurisprudence is nothing more nor less than the Court's construction of complicated common law type rules that cannot in any sane world be linked to the "material of the written law." The premise of McGinnis' argument, that Lady Justice should be blind to identity because federal judges decide or should decide cases based on paper materials alone, is far removed from how such judges decide cases in real life.

Since McGinnis concedes that what he calls "representativeness" might be appropriate for common law judges, and since, as David Strauss has shown persuasively, the Supreme Court acts like a common law court, McGinnis' opposition to President Biden considering identity when nominating judges, fails on his own terms. But there is more to discuss regarding McGinnis' essay.

Throughout his piece, McGinnis refers to the progressive idea that identity matters to judging in insulting and demeaning ways as well as criticizing President Biden for promising to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court (there has never been one). But this linking of identity to judicial nominations is hardly a progressive idea. Perhaps McGinnis forgot that Ronald Reagan promised during his 1980 campaign to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court, and then he did. Was it wrong in 1980 to believe that it was well-past time for a woman to have a seat on our highest Court? Of course not.

Furthermore, if McGinnis thinks that it was just sheer coincidence that President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, and that identity had nothing to do with that decision, then I'd like to sell him a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn. Even more recently, President Trump did not hide the fact that he was always hopeful that he could replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a conservative woman such as Amy Coney Barrett. Does McGinnis think gender had nothing to do with that decision? Focusing on identity politics in judicial nominations is not in any way just the record of progressives, contrary to McGinnis' snide suggestions.

Should identity matter to federal judicial nominations? Although President Trump served only one term, he appointed almost as many circuit court judges as President Obama did in two terms: Obama appointed 55 in 8 years whereas Trump appointed 54 in 4 years. Of the 54 court of appeals judges Trump nominated, none were Black (Obama nominated 9). Trump did nominate a number of Black district court judges but far fewer than recent Democratic Presidents. As far as women go, 24% of Trump's judges were women as opposed to 42% of Obama's judges.

Of course identity should matter to how our federal judiciary is staffed. I wonder whether Professor McGinnis cares that Trump appointed 54 appellate judges, with none of them being Black (one is Hispanic). These court of appeals judges, who have the final say over 99% of federal cases, wield enormous power and influence. The complete exclusion of Blacks from these positions for four years is quite simply unacceptable. Does McGinnis think there is not a single Black lawyer or judge in America who has the legal skills to be a circuit court judge? Does he think our federal judiciary should be only one quarter female?

Identity matters because people should have faith in government. When the Grutter and Gratz affirmative action cases were pending before the Supreme Court in 2003, former President Gerald Ford recruited a number of former Generals to join an amicus brief urging the Court not to abolish racial preferences at colleges and universities, including the elite military ones, because to " fulfill its mission, the military must be selective in admissions for training and education for the officer corps, and it must train and educate a highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps in a racially diverse setting." The Court cited these words in its Grutter opinion. The military needs a racially diverse officer corps for many different reasons, including the need for the American people to believe in the military. The same is true for federal judges.

Identity matters because federal judges deciding hard legal questions have, contrary to McGinnis' implications, enormous discretion, and that discretion is affected by values, politics, and life experiences, and not always in the ways McGinnis unfairly caricatures. As I've detailed on this blog, Justice Clarence Thomas has said that the motivations of university administrators who favor slight minority preferences in admissions are indistinguishable from the motivations of segregationists. Thomas admits that this view was formed in part by his experiences at Yale Law School in the early 1970's where he suffered great condescension. That experience undoubtedly affected Thomas' complete opposition as a constitutional matter to affirmative action. Who knows what views he would have on that hard issue had he had different life experiences?

Life experiences generate values and values matter. It is still sadly true that the life experiences of whites and blacks are very different as are the experiences of men and women. It is of course important that judges possess top-notch legal skills but it is also important their life experiences and resulting values reflect the experiences of a diverse America. No amount of intellectualizing can justify the complete exclusion of Blacks from Trump's 54 circuit court nominations.

In a perfect world, Lady Justice might well be blind but in that fantasy world, she wouldn't just live the white male experience. McGinnis ends his essay by lamenting that we once valued the "rule of law not men." When I teach Marbury v. Madison , and cite Chief Justice's Marshall famous paragraph using that phrase, I point out that today it would be the "rule of law not people." That is not identity politics, that's democracy.

Federal judges have substantial discretion. People with different experiences will decide cases differently. I sincerely hope President Biden keeps his promise to appoint the first Black Woman to the Supreme Court. He should be applauded for that effort, not criticized.

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In the Orbit of Lady Justice / Essay for the catalogue "Call for Justice"

2018, Call for Justice

This work is part of an exhibition catalogue Call for Justice, held recently at the Museum Hof Buysleyden in Mechelen (Malines) under the curatorship of Samuel Mareel and Manfred Sellink. I contributed to the scientific committee (discussions, selection of objects on display) and wrote an essay on this occasion "In the Orbit of Lady Justice".

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Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society] ISSN: 1335-3608

Peter I . Takacs

The representation of the idea of justice through the ancient Roman goddess-figure, recently known as Lady Justice, has constituted an essential part of European culture for centuries. This paper outlines these statues in town halls, courthouses, and public spaces in Hungary, and examines some of them in detail. The aim of the study is to draw a general picture of such statues in a Central and Eastern European country, namely in Hungary, to identify the characteristics of these sculptures, reflecting their social and political context, and in some cases to contrast them with that of those which were characteristic in Western Europe. The nature of this study is multi and interdisciplinary, so it applies several methods in exploring its theme; for example, art and cultural history were mixed with reference to social history and legal history. The paper focuses on the legal and political culture-conceived in the cultural context, institutional prerequisites and behavioral patterns as components of law and politics-and treats statues of Justice as part of this culture. As a way of introduction, the paper gives a brief overview of three murals, and discusses, briefly, the controversy around the authorship of one of them; stating that its attribution to Boticelli is, in all probability, misleading. The paper-after listing the Justitia statue in the town halls and court buildings of Hungary-evaluates in detail the statue of Justice which supplements the highly controversial Ferenc Deák Monument, erected in 1885 in central Budapest. It then analyses another one from1896 made by the finest sculptor of the late 19th century, Alajos Strobl, for the Palace of Justice which was opened in that same year. Finally, the paper gives a general overview of modern sculptures of the past two decades which can be found in Hungarian courthouses. The article illustrates, among other things, the interconnection of artworks and politics, sculpturing and law, and traditional values and modernity. In evaluating the selected representations of Lady Justice, it employs the approaches of political and cultural history as well as legal theory. For the sculptures in question, this study may raise questions from three disciplines: jurisprudence and law, social and cultural history, and the theory of art. The study is interdisciplinary and focuses primarily on the first and second areas mentioned, and, among other things, examines the cultural-historical functions of a law-related symbol. One of its main assertions is that statues of Lady Justice have been part of the legal culture for centuries, but the representation of justice has undergone changes as significant as the changes of legal systems themselves. On this issue, the study argues that representation is interwoven with concepts of law and justice and the relationship between politics and law. The study goes as far as to penetrate into the field of iconology at the level that E. Panofsky referred to as the pre-iconographic description, which is the first of the three possible steps in this field. At the second step, on the level of iconographic analysis, this study turns towards social and legal meanings, since it is interested in not so much about the aesthetic-iconological analysis of the artwork, but about the socio-legal and legal-cultural meanings of certain cultural phenomena. From the point of view of legal theory, of ethics and of general social theory, innumerable questions can be, and usually are, asked about the visualization of justice. The most typical questions include: what objects and tools are used to depict Justitia (Lady Justice), and what do they mean when applied to law? Does she have a sword in her hand which she raises as if she were just about to lower it, or maybe hide it behind her? The answer is telling about

Cristina S. Martinez

Suum Cuique Tribuere: Legal Contexts, Judicial Archetypes and Deep-Structures Regarding Courts of Appeal and Judiciaries from Early Modern to Late Modern Europe, eds. Kjell A. Modeer and Matin Sunnqvist (Stockholm: Institutet för Rättshistorisk Forskning / Olin Foundation), 131-173

Marie Seong-Hak Kim

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