The Enclosure of Justice: Courthouse Architecture, Due Process, and the Dead Metaphor of Trial

Abstract

Theories of justice have not had much to say about the space in which it is administered. Renderings of justice are almost entirely conceptual. In political theory, abstractions about the state of nature (an imagined condition in imaginary time) are followed by abstractions about consent, sovereignty, and just distribution that reduce agreement to implication, authority to inference, and equality to deferred expectation. In moral philosophy, exhortations about right action are offered in concededly metaphysical (which is to say, atemporal, disembodied) terms. And beyond the question of jurisdiction, which sovereignty implies, and the right of exclusion, which private property entails, precious little is said in legal theory about the relationship between justice and the space in which it operates.