"that under modern conditions the grand jury is seldom better than a rubber stamp of the prosecuting attorney and has ceased to perform or be needed for the function for which it was established and for which it was retained throughout the centuries; that .... an unnecessary work burden upon the administration of justice .... should be lightened by eliminating the necessity of indictment and permitting prosecution to be instituted and accusation to be made through the simpler processes of information."

In short order, however, President Jefferson and the Republicans regained the initiative. Shrugging off the Federalists' protests, the new Congress repealed the Judiciary Act, abolished the new courts, and put the so-called "midnight judges" out of their jobs. Jefferson also ordered his Secretary of State to ignore some signed commissions that the Adams administration had forgotten to deliver to justices of the peace during the chaotic changeover, leading William Marbury and several other would-be JPs to sue to get hold of their commissions. Marbury lost, but in deciding his case Chief Justice John Marshall promulgated what has become the classic statement of judicial review, the proposition that courts have the power to review the constitutionality of acts of Congress.

The turn-of-the-century controversy over the publication of dissenting opinions has escaped contemporary academic attention. To the extent that the criticism of dissenting opinions has appeared in scholarship at all, it has been understood as an example of "classical legal thought." As one account puts it, because classical legal thought strove to portray "law [as] neutral, objective and prepolitical," it was embarrassed by and adamantly opposed to the public expression of judicial disagreement. In an article on the opinion-writing practices of the Taft Supreme Court, Robert Post quotes some of the lawyers from this earlier era who inveighed against the publication of dissent. He too uses turn-of-the-century articles opposed to the publication of judicial dissent as examples of "a jurisprudential understanding of the nature of law [as] a grid of fixed and certain principles designed for the settlement of disputes," an understanding which he argues the members of the Taft Court gradually abandoned.

Colonial criminal jury trials involved far more than rituals that reflected the administration of power, although they were surely that. On the one hand, they made transparent the acts of the state in imposing its ultimate authority over the individual, the authority to punish, to take away an individual's liberty, even their life. On the other hand, the colonial citizenry was invited in not merely to be passive observers. They - at least the white men with property among them - were decisionmakers, members of a twelve-person lay jury. Courthouses had to be configured not only to make trials open, but also to permit space for the deliberating jury.

We could reduce this incongruity, on the one hand, by reviving the practical adjudicatory focus of the past or, on the other, by revising the iconography to take account of the new practices. Resnik and Curtis encourage both efforts, but they have more enthusiasm for the former. I want to suggest some ways in which imagery and design might be revised to express the importance and value of managerial judging. In particular, I suggest the relevance of what many will consider an unlikely source of inspiration for a new judicial iconography - modem manufacturing and factory design. The technological innovations associated with the Toyota Production System have produced an aesthetic that might contribute both functionally and expressively to the democratic accountability that Resnik and Curtis see as threatened by managerial judging.

Resnik and Curtis teach us to see how aspirations for justice are represented literally in the built environment of law. Resnik and Curtis give us permission to linger in the halls of justice, to pay attention to the statues and canvases that grace public buildings devoted to law, to notice the way in which law is a field of aesthetics in addition to being a field of pain and death (as Robert Cover famously reminded us). The art and architecture of law are not merely illustrations, placeholders, or simple representations; they are communicative acts designed to bring viewers into a closer connection with justice. Understanding this public aesthetics of law requires us to engage in "statue-tory" interpretation.

The experience was equally memorable for another reason: the racial imbalance of the entire occasion. Not only in the case of my voir dire, but more generally, all of the accused seemed to be black, which brings me to the relevance of my experience to a discussion on representing justice and specifically to the paper Blind Justice by I. Bennett Capers. My first courthouse experience took place in what I believe is the central courtroom in Manhattan criminal court, where the judge sits under a mural depicting the figure of Justice. In this 1893 painting by Edward Emerson Simmons, she is pictured as a beautiful woman, blond and without the expected blindfold. Kneeling before her are two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, also blond. Each presents an object on a pillow to Justice: he a sword, she a lily. However the iconography of this painting may symbolize justice tempered by mercy, its most powerful impression on me was made rather by the Caucasian blondness of its figures, by its promise of exclusively white justice in a court in which the defendants were predominantly black.

But despite the prominence of both artwork and building, no one has yet given a convincing answer to a simple question: Why is the former located in the latter? What do large rectangles of brute color have to do with justice - or the courts, or the federal government, or democracy? How do they-in the words of the General Services Administration (GSA), their owner - "facilitate a meaningful cultural dialogue between the American people and their government"?

There is, it bears emphasizing, a broader ecosystem beyond the courthouse/aquarium - the larger political community that those in the aquarium purport to serve while those in the academy engage in observation - which provides the relevant context. The confluence of court and community may usefully be approached through what I consider the iconic image of the American courthouse in the formative period of our legal and political history: it is the painting of Patrick Henry in the Hanover County Courthouse arguing the Parson 's Cause, which raised in 1763 the question whether and how the citizens of Virginia should compensate the Anglican clergy. The entire political community is on hand to observe and to participate. Of course, that political community was constricted; you will search in vain for the face of either a woman or an African American in the painting. Nevertheless, with those fundamental limitations to the polity of the American Eden acknowledged, it is evident that the observant and participatory community fills the courtroom and extends outside the courthouse door toward the tavern beyond, where, as Justice Robert H. Jackson once observed, lawyers and their clients traditionally retire to celebrate the "last rites" for court proceedings. There is historical symmetry in the fact that slightly more than two centuries later, this little courtroom also played a supporting role in the development of the constitutional doctrine - as opposed to the customary practice-of judicial transparency. A conviction imposed after a closed murder trial conducted in that courtroom became the vehicle by which the Supreme Court, in 1980, established a First Amendment right of press and public to attend criminal trials.

More specifically, Justice, traditionally grouped with the Cardinal Virtues, originated in ancient Greece. The Cardinal Virtues typically consisted of Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance, all of which had their accompanying attributes. For example, Fortitude might be depicted escorted by a lion or embracing a broken column and Temperance often holds a bridle. While certain of these props are unvarying, there was significant leeway in the choice of attributes over the centuries. E.H. Gombrich writes of the customary way of constructing an allegorical personification in which "an image or a concept can be explicated by means of attributes and it is really a matter of taste or tact how far the poet or artist wishes to go in piling up these specifications, how many attributes he wants to give Prudence to match her definition."

Much that we would wish to incorporate in a portrait of Justice is missing from the familiar image of the Goddess with the Scales. True, leaving things out of a depiction can sharpen our perception of what remains. Yet it is also true that focusing on what has been omitted can help us move beyond what is familiar. As artists sometimes portray a figure by drawing the negative space around it, looking for what is absent from an image can clarify what is present.

Ceremonial practices common in American courtrooms have hardly been without controversy. In one of the most important critical treatments of judicial ceremony, the late American federal judge Jerome Frank mentioned three possible general effects, focusing on the judicial robe.

(He tellingly called his essay "The Cult of the Robe.") First, the robe could enhance the prestige of the judge and, hence, respect for the judicial process. He cites Pascal to the effect that "august apparel" is necessary to promote respect for judicial decisions. In the same vein, uniform appearance of the judges could promote the idea that justice is itself "uniform," which also might increase respect for the "rule of law." Second, the robe could be a "harmless relic" that has no impact on anyone and is worn just as a matter of tradition. Finally, it could create "disquiet" in lawyers, litigants, and witnesses, which would reduce their satisfaction with the experience and interfere with efficient and accurate fact finding. Frank endorses the last point, mentioning with favor the few judges who do not wear robes in court and urging that the robe be abolished. His only evidence for the proposition that robes are harmful is anecdotal. Though Frank wrote over half a century ago, none of his hypotheses have been studied empirically.

The meeting in Carnegie Hall . . . opened with a pageant of free nations, grouped colorfully about the central figure of "Justice" enthroned, before whom enchained America with a black-draped following of mourning women came to beg for a place in the light of true democracy. . . . Miss Vida Milholland took the central part of "Justice," receiving the beautifully costumed women of free nations, who grouped about her in a glorious massing of color and light as the black-robed women of disfranchised America approached to make their plea."

This vignette is taken from a March 1919 edition of The Suffragist- the weekly publication of the National Woman's Party (NWP) - and describes one of the last suffrage pageants staged by that early twentiethcentury American woman suffrage organization during the final push for a federal suffrage amendment. Suffrage pageants were not unusual. In the last decades of the fight over woman suffrage in America, the contest was waged in images and symbols as much as words, on the streets and in theaters as much as in the courts and legislatures. As in the Carnegie Hall pageant, the figure of Justice played a prominent role in pro-suffrage spectacle. Other candidates were available, and among the pantheon of female allegorical figures others - including Liberty, Truth, and Columbia - also featured in suffrage spectacles. But, as shown below, Justice frequently was the star-likely her first modern feminist role.' In this Essay, I offer a brief, historically sensitive interpretation of the figure of Justice in woman suffrage spectacle and propaganda, deciphering, as best as possible, Justice's salience and function in the battle over woman suffrage.

First, an anecdote: Shortly after September 11, 2001, I was with Judith Resnik, who, in response to the great proliferation of American flags on display on buildings, vehicles, and jacket lapels, commented that it would be better for us to "show our courts." Although I could not quite visualize what physically she had in mind (representations of justice appended to our car radio antennae?), I clearly understood her sentiment-that it was the exercise of justice through our courts that would be a more fitting and effective and even patriotic response to the threats represented by 9/11 than the display of our flag. With the publication of her and Dennis Curtis's monumental volume, Representing Justice, and with the papers presented at the conference on the same theme, I understand better what "showing our courts" means, in the dual senses of showing and showing off opening our courts, and by extension our legal system as a whole, to greater public view and participation among our citizenry; and displaying them in patriotic pride to our foreign adversaries as the most powerful weapons in our democratic arsenal.