Page 5 - Court: The Place of Law and the Space of the City

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Figure 2: Analytical diagram of movement patterns and sight lines within the Heliaia.

vessels. In practice, however, surviving accounts observe that the porosity of the space meant that bystanders
held physically beyond the limits of the Court were clearly audible, in some instances also visible, and free
to interject. As a result, the appeals made by both parties during the trial often directly addressed the public,
although the latter could never submit their votes formally, throwing into question the seemingly privileged
role of the formal judiciary [11].
As mentioned, this formation of civic and legal archetypes in ancient Greece informed a set of social
practices that remained prevalent for the centuries to follow in their belief that for the very premise of the
Law as a social ‘contract’ to serve as an effective structure, it must be enacted unreservedly under the public
gaze. It is clear, however, that the spatial relations of the Agora also imbued the spectacle of the legal ritual
with a hierarchical complexity that was to re-emerge in the insularity of modern Courts two millennia later.
Indeed, the space of ancient Athenian Law is believed to have become consolidated sometime around the
st
1 century BC to resemble a complex of internalised buildings more akin to those of contemporary legal
architecture [11], to which I will return in subsequent chapters. Turbulent and ambiguous as the public