The Democratic Courthouse examines how changing understandings of the relationship between government and the governed came to be reflected in the buildings designed to house the modern legal system from the 1970s to the present day in England and Wales.
The book explores the extent to which egalitarian ideals and the pursuit of new social and economic rights altered existing hierarchies and expectations about how people should interact with each other in the courthouse. Drawing on extensive public archives and private archives kept by the Ministry of Justice, but also using case studies from other jurisdictions, the book details how civil servants, judges, lawyers, architects, engineers and security experts have talked about courthouses and the people that populate them. In doing so, it uncovers a changing history of ideas about how the competing goals of transparency, majesty, participation, security, fairness and authority have been achieved, and the extent to which aspirations towards equality and participation have been realised in physical form. As this book demonstrates, the power of architecture to frame attitudes and expectations of the justice system is much more than an aesthetic or theoretical nicety. Legal subjects live in a world in which the configuration of space, the cues provided about behaviour by the built form and the way in which justice is symbolised play a crucial, but largely unacknowledged, role in creating meaning and constituting legal identities and rights to participate in the civic sphere.
Key to understanding the modern-day courthouse, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in all fields of law, architecture, sociology, political science, psychology and criminology.
Author(s): Linda Mulcahy, Emma Rowden
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 370
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of figures, charts and tables
Table of cases
Table of legislation
Abbreviations and acronyms
Preface
1 Designing for democracy: the geopolitics of the courthouse
Introduction
Courts in democracies
Democracy in courts
A jurisprudence of design
A democratic aesthetic?
From a jurisprudence of design to humane design
Why does a critical approach to the architecture of law courts matter?
Why this period?
Methodology and the microphysics of power
The structure of the book
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part I Towards a democratic courthouse
2 The birth of a modern criminal justice system
Introduction
What problems were reformers seeking to solve?
The state of the court estate in the 1970s
Radical reform: a thirst for modernisation
The reforming Lord Chancellor: Gerald Gardiner
The logical scientist: Richard Beeching
Transformation of the court estate
Conclusion
Notes
References
3 A shift towards democratic courthouses?
Introduction
The balance between old and new
The building wrapper
Spaces of transition
Zoning in the courthouse
The public zone
The performance hub
The prison in the courthouse
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II Professional voices
4 Moving targets: the challenges of the Beeching reforms for Whitehall
Introduction
A unity of all the talents? The Court Standards Working Party
Scope for innovation: between a rock and a hard place
Webs of influence and responsibility
The immediate demand for courts
The young pretender: expertise in the Lord Chancellor’s Department
Rising tensions
A shifting political agenda
Conclusion
Notes
References
5 Architectural agency in imagining the democratic courthouse
Introduction
Shifting perceptions of the role of architecture in the public sphere
A nexus of architectural discourse
The private sector
In house salaried architects
Architects as regulators
The facilitation of architectural voice
Constraints on the autonomy of architects and design excellence
An incomplete professional project
Towards standardisation of design?
Aesthetic concerns as a costly nuisance
Conclusion
Notes
References
6 The courthouse as machine: technocratic understandings of legal space
Introduction
The concept of a design guide
Court design guides
Lexical units and taxonomies
Justice and technocracy
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part III Lay voices?
7 Who was consulted? hierarchies of knowledge in the articulation of design principles
Introduction
A thirst for consultation
Consultation hierarchies
Elite professionals
Non-elite professional groups
The marginalised
Conclusion
Notes
References
8 Danger and democracy: outsiders in the public sphere
Introduction
Placing the public in the courtroom
Danger and democracy
Stranger danger in the courthouse
Rendering proceedings opaque: sightlines in the courtroom
The courthouse as fortress
Conclusion
Notes
References
9 Docks and locks in criminal courts
Introduction
Safe spaces
Diminishing facilities for the defendant
Incarceration in the courtroom
Rooms within rooms: the enclosure of the dock
The advent of the ‘secure dock’
Mounting concerns about the dock
Security or resources?
Conclusion
Notes
References
10 Flexible futures
Introduction
Vanishing trials and vanishing courthouses
Changes to who uses the litigation system and how they use it
Appearing in court
The use of alternative venues for trials
Possible futures
Towards a new jurisprudence of design
Flexible spaces
The need to design for a distributed estate
Consulting with lay users and allowing them to regulate virtual justice spaces
Conclusion
Notes
References
Appendix: List of archival materials consulted
The National Archives (UK) (TNA) (open access)
TNA files – analysed as pertinent
TNA files – analysed as not pertinent, or only marginally relevant
Ministry of Justice Archives (MoJ) (UK) (closed access)
MoJ files analysed
Further archival materials were consulted from the following collections
Index
