The Democratic Courthouse

This event has ended.

The School of Law and Politics in conjunction with the Centre of Law and Society are pleased to announce that Professor Linda Mulcahy, Professor at LSE and Director of the PhD Academy, will deliver a public lecture entitled:

“The Democratic Courthouse” on Thursday 15th November 2018

Dr Linda Mulcahy is a Professor at the LSE and Director of the PhD Academy. From January 2019 she will be taking up the post of Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford where she will also be the director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

Having gained qualifications in law, sociology and the history of art and architecture, Linda’s work has a strong interdisciplinary flavour. Her research focuses on disputes and their resolution and she has studied the socio-legal dynamics of disputes in a number of contexts including the car distribution industry, NHS, divorce, public sector complaints systems and judicial review. Her work often has an empirical focus and she has received a number of grants from the ESRC, AHRC, Leverhulme Foundation, Department of Health, Nuffield Foundation and Lotteries Fund in support of her work.  In recent years she has been working on the relationship between due process and the design of law courts.  She is also interested in visual representations of justice.

This presentation will examine the relationship between architectural designs, due process and dignity in the context of discussions about the work that courthouses are expected to do in the contemporary public sphere. More particularly it considers what courthouses are intended to symbolise, the affect they are intended to have on the many publics that use them and the sorts of behaviour they seek to facilitate.

Drawing on a detailed analysis of public and private government archives funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this paper will chart how civil servants, judges, lawyers, architects, engineers and security experts have talked about English and Welsh courthouses in the corridors of Whitehall over the last 50 years.  It pays particularly close attention to the centralised design guides they produced which prescribed how all courts across the country were to be designed. 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 popular sovereignty, egalitarianism and participation have been realised in physical form.

The paper examines the apparent paradox that despite the democratic ideals espoused by the modern state, the laity has become increasingly spatially marginalised in courthouses and legal proceedings in the last fifty years.   It argues that this has been rendered possible by the absence of a jurisprudence of design in legal and government circles.

The public lecture will commence at 18.00 (in room 1.30, Law Building, Museum Avenue, Cardiff).  A pre-lecture drinks reception will be held in room 1.28, Law Building from 17:15.

Attendance is free but strictly by ticket only.  Those wishing to attend are encouraged to book tickets as soon as possible.