The Foolosophy of Justice and the Enigma of Law

When lawyers use images in juristic texts, what is their legal meaning? Specifically, when legal texts print pictures of Justice and of Justice blindfolded, as they did particularly in the sixteenth century in legally authored emblem books and works of doctrine, then what is their significance for lawyers? And more specifically still, what is the proper interpretation of the blindfold, which we find not only on Justice (Justitia) but also on juristic representations of Cupid, Fate (Fortuna), bridegrooms, and the condemned? My answer, I will not tease or otherwise keep you waiting, is that the image of Justitia is technically an aenigma iuris, a legal symbol whose referent has been forgotten.2 My initial proof, my text, my image, will be a paradoxical one taken from a legal treatise, Barth6lemy Aneau's Jurisprudentia, a somewhat hagiographical history of jurisprudence first published in 1554. My focus will be on the figure of Justitia used immediately following a textual discussion of mythological sources of legal rule and of the homines sacer, the holy interpreters of law. While I will show that the figure, which pictures Justitia on a pedestal, sighted and reading from a book of the laws to an audience of blindfolded lawyers, is paradoxically a didactic and moralizing excursus in political theology, there is a further