ABSTRACT
Image making and image management are important and pervasive characteristics of the judicial institution. 1 The values and virtues of judicial office such as judicial independence, obedience to the law and dedication to the promotion and realization of legal policy are made and made public in and through visual images of the judge. Baum calls these the legal instrumental dimensions of the judicial image. 2 ‘Status’, ‘esteem’ and ‘respect’ are a second set of preoccupations. The particular concern with status comes from the fact that in the Western political tradition the independent judiciary is closely associated with social and political elites. 3 High status is one of the attractions of the post. Successful presentation to self and others in all these dimensions involves considerable art, monitoring and management, including refined skills of audience awareness and the expenditure of significant amounts of funds and labour to produce and manage the judicial image. 4 Images of the judiciary are produced through a range of media, taking a variety of forms and for a multiplicity of audiences. This chapter focuses on visual images and one judicial image in particular. It takes the form of an extraordinary judicial spectacle; an annual procession of the judges of the United Kingdom Supreme Court. The analysis that follows examines the way in which this spectacle resorts to an aesthetics of both the extraordinary and the ordinary, long-standing aesthetic traditions and novelty. It offers a critical analysis of the incorporation of an ordinary everyday act, crossing the road via a pedestrian crossing, into an extraordinary spectacle of legitimate judicial authority. But before considering the specific characteristics of the annual procession I begin with a short review of existing work that explores aesthetic dimensions of judicial image making. 5
