Faculty Research Seminars - The Democratic Courthouse

Faculty Research Seminars will again this year take place on Thursdays from 12:30-2pm in the Law Board Room in weeks 2 and 7. Lunch and refreshments will be provided from 12:30pm with the seminar starting at 1pm.

This paper will examine the relationship between architectural design, due process and dignity in the context of stakeholder discussions about the work that courthouses are expected to do in the contemporary public sphere. More particularly it considers what courthouses are intended to symbolise, the affect they have on the many publics that use them and the sorts of behaviour that design facilitates. Drawing on a detailed analysis of public and private government archives funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this paper will chart how civil servants, judges, lawyers, architects, engineers and security experts have talked about courthouses over a 50 year period.  In doing so, it uncovers a changing history of ideas about the ways in which the competing goals of transparency, majesty, participation, security, fairness and authority have been approached and the extent to which aspirations towards popular sovereignty, egalitarianism and participation have been realized in physical form.