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

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 jurisdic- tional 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,1 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 icono- graphic 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.