Justice unmasked: A semiotic analysis of Justitia
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Wendy Sutherland-Smith
Abstract
Values such as justice, fairness, reason, and truth permeate the cultural fabric of societies. A key image of these values in many Western democracies is the legal icon of Justitia or Lady Justice as she embodies notions of justice. Examining such cultural constructions promotes discussion of assumed values and meanings pertaining to iconic representations. Semiotic analysis of Justitia and her compositional elements — the sword of justice, scales of justice, and blind-fold reveal tensions between the rhetoric and reality of our interpretations of justice. This paper makes explicit the iconic representations of societal values imbued in Justitia and raises questions about the invisible power of cultural reproduction.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Meaning and interpretation: The semiotic similarities and differences between Cognitive Grammar and European structural linguistics
- Can Saussure's orangery manuscripts shed new light on biosemiotics?
- A choice of emblemes and other devices
- Symbolism in handwriting
- A sociosemiotic interpretation of linguistic modality in legal settings
- Tracking the distribution of individual semantic features in gesture across spoken discourse: New perspectives in multi-modal interaction
- Competitive cities and human scales: The semiotics of urban excess
- Justice unmasked: A semiotic analysis of Justitia
- The subversive agent: Anatomy of personal ideological change
- On theatrical semiosphere of postdramatic theatrical event: Rethinking the semiotic epistemology in performance analysis today
- Poinsot and semiotics
