In times of transition and transformation, legal images metastasize. This idea can be usefully related both to Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects and Barthes’ theory of myth. But each tell only part of the full story. Barthes fails to fully account for the stabilizing effect of the reassuring signifier; Winnicott fails to fully account for the ideological adaptability—and implications—of the shifting signified. The legal image unites the iterability of the signifier and the polysemy of the signified, harnessing the affective intensity (...) of the former to the cultural mobility of the latter. In this article, I propose to illustrate this insight by reflecting on two notable images of law that appeared at a moment of profound legal transformation, at the dawn of the early modern era. The images of ‘blind justice’ and ‘sol justitiae’ which the article discusses are both ‘transitional myths’, facilitating through modes of affect a legal journey into uncharted territory. Paying attention to these images and above all to their transformation over time, we can observe not only the process of legal transition at work, but the function of the image in its authorization and modalization. (shrink)

One day in the year 1274, Giuntino Jacobi appeared at the church of Santo Stefano in Quarrata. According to the notarial contract in the register of Ildebrandino d'Accatto, Giuntino was already seething with rage when he arrived at the sanctuary. When he then tried to force his way into the church, the presbyter Donato refused him access by slamming the door in his face. There is little doubt that Donato felt threatened, as he very quickly set about raising the hue (...) and cry by sounding the church bell and calling out for help. Meanwhile Giuntino, in a gesture portending Khrushchev's more famous one, took off his shoe and began pounding on the church door until a group of local men arrived and carted him away. Donato lost no time in denouncing the shoe-thumping Giuntino to the court of the podestà. When Giuntino absented himself from court, he was fined 200 fiorini piccoli, declared contumacious, and by order of the General Council banished from the commune of Florence and its territories. Thanks to the institution of the peace agreement, this story has an unexpected ending. Six months later, Donato and Giuntino stood before a notary and three witnesses in the church of Sant'Angelo di Quarrata and reconciled their differences. Their dispute was settled with the kiss of peace. The written witness—the peace agreement—was duly registered in the notarial protocol of Ildebrandino d'Accatto. (shrink)