Courthouse Iconography and Chayesian Judical Practice

Abstract

This contribution to a symposium on Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis’s Representing Justice considers what courthouse imagery and design might be appropriate for “Chayesian” judicial practice. The imagery and design that Resnik and Curtis examine largely connotes traditional litigation - lawsuits that are bi-polar, retrospective, and self-contained. However, judicial practice is increasingly Chayesian - concerned with forward-looking efforts to coordinate multipolar problems with sprawling party structures. Traditional iconography is inadequate to Chayesian practice because it celebrates equilibrium and communicates information about cases one-by-one. By contrast, Chayesian intervention often induces productive disequilibrium and it can only be made transparent through expression that aggregates information across individual claims. I suggest that a promising source of inspiration for an iconography of Chayesian practice would be modern factory design in the style associated with the Toyota Production System. Toyota-style manufacturing has produced a self-conscious and sophisticated set of visual principles designed to express and implement the disequilibrating and aggregating features that the Toyota approach shares with Chayesian judicial practice.