Book Review: Leif Dahlberg (ed.).Visualizing Law and Authority: Essays on Legal Aesthetics

The courtroom is a strange place, when you think about it. For someone like myself, educated in the tradition and pageantry of the English common law, pictures of robed and wigged judges and barristers in the news and media, and even in art and television, appeared quite normal, if a little quaint. However, as Leif Dahlberg writes in the introduction to this volume, judicial proceedings allow us to grasp the abstract notions of law and authority (p.1). The spatial and temporal organisation of the trial gives meaning to ‘law’ and ‘authority’. The different courtroom architectures found in different countries and in different legal systems show how law and authority are constructed differently in different places. Dahlberg contrasts the compartmentalised courtrooms of England and Wales, with their strict control of the movements of the defendant, witnesses and the public, to the more open architecture of French courts, where members of the audience are free to come and go as they please (pp.1-2). Despite these differences in layouts, dress and architecture, Dahlberg makes the point that the meaning of these manifestations of law and authority is revealed not by simply contemplating the aesthetic differences but by participating in those activities, and being aware of the gap between physical appearance and functional meaning (p.3).