ABSTRACT
Empowered communities have much to gain from denying the rhetorical dimensions of law because by doing so they maintain the hegemony of lawyers and judges. Valorizing the "precedents" of the past means preserving the power and memories of those who have the authority to interpret those decisions. One of the most intriguing rhetorical dimensions of the American judicial system involves how "rules of law" are constituted or impacted by visual artifacts. Consequently, rhetoricians and other scholars must augment their critiques of textual material with investigations that examine the legal impact of architecture, monuments, museums, and other forms of memorialization. The force of the law resides in its mythical claim to a universal neutrality within the particular context of the nation. Through universality claims to a naturalized and rationalized state justice, law provides an overarching frame, a totalizing narrative, by which to structure, organize, and idealize the possibilities of future action.
