Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights In City-States and Democratic Courtrooms

The relationship between courts and democracy is the central question of this book. The authors explore the evolution of adjudication into its modern form by mapping the remarkable run of the political icon of Justice and by tracing the development of public spaces dedicated to justice-courthouses.

Resnik and Curtis analyze how Renaissance "rites" of judgment turned into democratic "rights," requiring governments to protect judicial independence and to provide open and public hearings. Courts developed, alongside the press and the postal services, as mechanisms for building the public sphere and for calling the government to account. During the twentieth century, all persons gained access to rights of fair treatment in courts.

Today, however, private processes are replacing public ones, as public and private sectors promote settlement, devolve decision-making to agencies, and outsource judgments to arbitrators and mediators. Often clad in glass to mark justice’s transparency, new courthouse designs celebrate adjudication without reflecting on the problems of access, injustice, opacity, and the complexity of rendering impartial judgments.

With more than 220 images, readers can see both the longevity of aspirations for the Virtue Justice and the transformation of courts, as well as understand that, while venerable, courts are also vulnerable institutions that ought (like the post and the press) not be taken for granted. The argument is that the movement away from public adjudication is a problem for democracies because adjudication has important contributions to make to democracy.

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Liman Center for Public Interest Law, supporting post-graduate fellowships and research. Resnik teaches courses on federalism, procedure, courts, punishment, equality, and citizenship. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship of democratic values to government services such as courts, prisons, and post offices; collective redress and class actions; privatization; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts and the forms and norms of federalism; practices of punishment; and equality and gender. In 2018, Resnik was a recipient of a two-year Andrew Carnegie Fellowship was awarded an honorary doctorate from University College London. Resnik is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Dennis Curtis is Clinical Professor of Law Emeritus at the Yale Law School, where he teaches courses on sentencing and professional responsibility.Professor Curtis was one of the pioneers of clinical education in the 1970s. He created a program at Yale in which faculty supervised students working with indigent clients in a variety of contexts, so that students could gain insights into an area of substantive law in an administrative-regulatory context. For example, Yale Law students represented federal inmates at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, and patients at Connecticut Valley mental hospital. At U.S.C., where he taught from 1981 to 1996, students assisted federal inmates at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution and state inmates at the California Institute for Women at Frontera, California. In addition, clinical students working with Professor Curtis at Yale and at U.S.C. were active in legal service programs on behalf of aliens, the elderly, the homeless, the developmentally disabled, and clients of legal aid societies.In 1997, upon returning to Yale Law School, Professor Curtis developed a new clinical offering with the Connecticut agency charged with administering the lawyer disciplinary process. For several years, he directed that clinic, in which students worked with Connecticut's State Disciplinary Counsel to prosecute lawyers who violated rules of professional conduct. Professor Curtis has continued to teach about the ethics of lawyering, and in more recent years, developed a course on Professional Ethics, Public Interest, and the Media.In addition, since the late 1990s, Professor Curtis has joined sitting judges and law professors in shaping new courses on the law of sentencing. Professor Curtis's writings in the area of post-conviction justice include Mistretta and Metaphor, 66 Southern California Law Review 607 (1992); The Reform of Federal Sentencing and Parole Laws, National Prison Project Journal, Fall 1987, and the book Toward a Just and Effective Sentencing System: Agenda for Legislative Reform (with Pierce O'Donnell and Michael Churgin) (Praeger 1979).Professor Curtis has also written several essays on clinical education and the legal profession, including: Educating Lawyers: Clinical Programs and the Legal Profession, Keynote Address at World Clinical Conference, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, September 8, 2006 (published as translated into Japanese in 2007); Teaching Billing: Metrics of Value in Law Firms and Law Schools (with Judith Resnik), 54 Stanford Law Review 1409 (2002); Grieving Criminal Defense Lawyers (with Judith Resnik), 70 Fordham Law Review 1615 (2002); and Can Law Schools and Big Law Firms Be Friends? 74 Southern California Law Review 65 (2000).Professor Curtis received his B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy and his LL.B. from Yale. After graduating from the Naval Academy, Professor Curtis spent eight years in the United States Navy, for most of that time as a line officer in submarines.