Images of Justice and Understandings of the Visual in Human Rights

• In Event: Visual Epistemologies and Human Rights

Abstract

This paper builds on an expanding field of studying images of justice as an insight into modes of organizing law in a society. A focus of the paper is the transformation of the national Constitutional Court in South Africa and the making of its art collection, elucidated by one of the Court’s founding Justices, Albie Sachs. Sachs’ account is compared to other scholarship on art as reflecting and shaping systems of justice, accounts such as those by Desmond Manderson of ANU and Judith Resnik at Yale. The experience of the Constitutional Court of South Africa is an example of deploying art and architecture to mark a transition in the administration of justice from the apartheid to post-apartheid eras. In the paper, I show how art, in its depictions of justice, has mobilizing, legitimating, caricatural and critical functions.

Author

• Monroe E. Price, U of Pennsylvania