ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the question of spaces of justice. It focuses on the contemporary development. The chapter examines the use of transparency, or the new opacity, as an integral aspect of contemporary courthouse design. It discusses the evolution in courthouse design, from a traditional architecture used in the main representatives of common and civil law legal traditions (in England and France) to a post-modern architecture that claims to be ‘transparent’. The chapter considers the dilemmas posed by such post-modern courthouse design, and the differences between notions of opacity and theories of transparency. It develops the discussion of transparency put forward by the architects. Courthouse architects should operate on a symbolic scale. It was a nationalist or even a dogmatic nationalist discourse of ‘speaking architecture’ that developed in the nineteenth century. The chapter looks, with J. Lacan, at a transparent building.
