Lady Justice is designed to represent the perfect running of our justice system — is what she represents actually the reality today, or more of an ideal? Website Cookie Policy. Areas Covered. Your comments will, of course be treated in the strictest confidence. Charity Law. Child Law. Civil Disputes. Criminal Law. Employment Law. Family Finance.
The statue of Lady Justice holding the Scales of Justice demonstrates an aura of fairness, opportunity and, as you can imagine, justice. In fact, Lady Justice, or a version of it, is not only common to the United States, but is a familiar symbol for multiple countries across the world.
This should come to no surprise as Maat symbolized Egyptian ideologies of balance, harmony, justice, law and order; Themis represented fairness, law and order; and Dike embodied fair judgment and moral order. Since then, a version of Lady of Justice hoisting the Scales of Justice can be seen in various alterations in numerous countries. Now, although Lady Justice statues may vary, the one characterization of Lady Justice that most are familiar with has three distinct features: a blindfold, the scales of justice and a sword.
The interaction between tokens is an integral part of uncovering less-than-obvious readings of an artifact. If we focus attention on the intermixing of the blindfold and the scales, we receive a contradictory understanding. On one hand, the blindfold targets the eyes, veiling our vision as well as theoretical aspects of vision such as foresight, goal-setting, or more generally, planning for the future and hinders our ability to see.
On the other hand, the scales represent a tool that is commonly used as a method of visually determining the weight of objects. A method, or process of weighing with a balance scale requires our ability to see what we are doing; as a result, we contradict the notion of weighing by removing one of the most crucial senses, sight. Albeit, one might ponder whether the other senses e. Plaintiff Lev Tsitrin felt the same way. As previously discussed, the sword stood in for judgment and defense; each is on an opposing side of the Law.
In other words, the sword can be used to strike and enforce the law against a lawbreaker or used as a method of defending oneself with the Law. However, juxtaposed with the blindfold, there is a relationship that is disturbing. While you swing this rather large object, everyone who is present at your party would stand back so they would not be victims of collateral damage i.
In cases such as Maxwell v. Sheppard , we can see the illustration of this metonymic interaction in reality. Plaintiff Maxwell had his constitutional rights for due process compromised because of the influence of the media present in the courtroom. In such a polarized example, whom does the sword judge?
This interaction yields a collateral effect because the sword is not always defending the defendant or vice versa. The spectators the media can be found screaming the action of screaming is pervasive — like the media!
Finally, the sword and scales intermix to enlighten the critic with a sense of duality. The sword is in one hand and the scales in the other; both require skills of finesse to use properly. The sword requires strength, speed, and impeccable accuracy whereas the scales require balance, precision, and the ability to stand stock-still.
To better illustrate this duality, consider the human body as a coordinate plane; we can quadrant this plane off into points. In this case, we are only concerned with the top half consisting of both arms. On one point, the arm bearing the sword represents an active movement where the arm moves wildly and freely to use the sword at full capacity while the body moves minimally.
On the other point, the scales require being held at a fixed location — in order to uphold precision. The holder of the scales would have to ensure the body would maneuver around that fixed point to ensure the scales are not disturbed while being used to measure. This illustration attempts to draw out and shed light on the difficulty in micromanaging human movement to this degree. By using the sword to defend or enforce the law, we would have to compromise precision from the scales because they would succumb to an indirect transfer of movement from using the sword at full capacity.
But this time you are wielding the bat in one hand and balancing not holding a ball in the other. For this illustration, being blindfolded does not matter; however note the task of swinging the bat single-handedly and balancing the ball simultaneously. Without compromising one for the author, how does the justice system compensate for this difficult relationship? By swinging the bat with one hand, it ends up feeling top-heavy, hard to control, ineffective.
The intermixture of metonymic tokens can show us more of an underlying representation that stems from visual artifacts. Because the meanings in each token are unstable — having the capability to change when juxtaposed with one another, creating a combined effect or exhibiting an interaction — it is important to understand how metonymic tokens work. Each part in itself also expands hermeneutic depth. For example, after analyzing the metonymic tokens above, notice how this approach adds precision, texture, and cultural insight to our understanding of the blindfold, appealing to the impartiality of justice to some, but also stoicism and the need for a rational society to others.
These readings apart from each other — but also integrated in Justitia — show the usefulness of the metonymic token, a concept that helps us to make sense of an artifact or message that we are confronted with in our daily lives. By also expanding to the hermeneutics of MTI, we were able to make sense of interacting metonymic tokens, which have opened doors to new ways of parsing visual rhetoric.
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