Consider this six-metre aluminium female form on a busy street corner in Melbourne, Australia. What possessed designers to put this image outside a building and assume that passersby would see it as marking a courthouse rather than puzzle about why someone hung a warrior princess as a shingle?
Of course, the Victoria county court is not alone. Outside Zambia's high court stands a similar statue of a woman, and her form is repeated in a brightly colored cloth made for the Zambia Women Judges Association.
The figure is also familiar in Europe and in North America – on top of London's Old Bailey; at the Peace Palace in the Hague; in what was the central courtroom for the European court of justice; and in the law courts of Vancouver, Canada.
The visual vocabulary of courts - rooted in Babylonian, Egyptian, Classical, and Renaissance iconography - provides a transnational symbol of government, and courts have become obligatory facets of good governance. Consider the image of two women: one with scales, sword and blindfold; the other, Prudence, regarding herself in a mirror. Justice was once regularly shown with Prudence as well as Fortitude and Temperance, the four cardinal virtues. We know this imagery of justice because we have been taught it. Rulers regularly link themselves to the virtue Justice as they seek legitimacy for the laws that they make and enforce.
Indeed, the deployment of didactic images is centuries old, as this 4000-year-old Mesopotamian drawing of a god with scales makes plain. Justice iconography has ancient origins, but the practices of justice have radically changed.
Judges were once subservient to the king; today we insist on their independence. The "rites" of the public spectacles of judgment became "rights" that oblige governments to provide open as well as impartial hearings to litigants.
Further, while Justice has long been portrayed as a woman, only during the last century have women and men of all colours become eligible to participate in all court roles – from litigant to lawyer to witness, juror and judge.
As democratic principles of equality changed court processes, conflicts emerged about whether and how to personify justice – what "she" should look like, and which symbols deserved places of honour.
The image of a justice in the US federal court for the Virgin Islands is a rare example of a dark-skinned portrayal. But the artist had instead proposed to use a Moco Jumbie, a mythical African figure of protection, which has made its way into carnivals. The local United States federal court committee charged with making decisions about the art rejected that proposal, on the grounds that it would be an "unsuitable as a symbol of justice", as well as one depicting a former slave emerging from his bondage.
Democracy has not only changed courts and prompted revision of the iconography, democratic principles also challenge courts.
Most governments do not adequately fund their justice systems to make good on promises of equal justice before the law. In Britain, the government has recently proposed closing 142 courts. In the United States, a new coalition seeks to "save our courts" to protect them from cutbacks.
Yet new policies in the US and the UK shift towards privatisation. Court rules press litigants to settle disputes or to use mediation. In some countries, courts enforce contracts insisting that consumers and employees waive their rights to litigate and use the private arbitration system chosen by manufacturers and employers.
No pictures – of justice or the participants – are available for display, as the decisions are all made out of sight.
This movement away from public adjudication is a problem for democracies. Adjudication contributes to democracies because it itself is a democratic process, which obliges disputants and judges to treat each other as equals, to provide information to each other and to offer public justifications for decisions.
The 220 images of our book map the relationship between courts and democracy and serve as reminders that courts, as the egalitarian institutions we know today, are relatively recent inventions. While venerable, they are at present also vulnerable.
Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis are professors at Yale Law School. They are the co-authors of Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms, Yale Press, 2011.
