Judging pictures: a case study of portraits of the Chief Justices, Supreme Court of New South Wales

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)

* The preliminary research was undertaken with the generous financial and institutional support of the University of Sydney, January to April 2007; particular thanks to Gail Mason and Jenny Millbank. Linda Mulcahy, Dermot Feenan and participants in seminars in various universities in Australia (Sydney, Flinders, Macquarie, Melbourne), and at Birkbeck College gave detailed and insightful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to participants in the 18th British Legal History conference and the SLSA conference in 2008.

1

Introduction

This is an essay about portraits, judicial portraits: both painted and photographic images of the judiciary. The visual objects that make up this case-study are a series of judicial portraits that span a period from 1824 to the present day. They are pictures of the sixteen Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia. This dataset includes fifteen painted portraits that represent all but the current Chief Justice displayed in or near the Banco Court (the Chief Justice's court), ¹ on the thirteenth floor of the New South Wales Supreme Court building, Sydney, Australia. It also includes pictures of sixteen Chief Justices found on the website of the Supreme Court.² In that context, the pictures of the first thirteen Chief Justices are digital photographic copies of the painted portraits and the rest (the last three Chief Justices) are photographic portraits. Burke (2001, p. 28) suggests that a dataset such as this (a series of pictures of the same subject over a period of time) is particularly valuable. It provides opportunities not only to study the aesthetics and the meanings that the pictures have in common but it also creates the possibility of identifying and examining differences between them. Minor changes, Burke suggests, may be indicative of changes of major significance. In undertaking this project, I begin with a few words about the wider context of judicial research and scholarly developments in the social sciences and legal scholarship that have extended the research agenda to incorporate visual culture. I then examine existing legal scholarship on visual images of judges. After considering the insights and limitations of this work, I turn to a wider body of art historical scholarship on portraiture. The objective here is to identify some...