What looks stable and hieratic, through the figure of a sedentary Justice, may be no more than an artificial harmony. Far from naive modalities inherently inferior to her attributes, the question of posture possesses a unique capacity to foster mindfulness, bodily empowerment or threshold awareness. Law lives in the multisensory performances of gestures. We tend to overlook some of the most obvious physical postures because we are not aware that they retain symbolic significance. Sitting or standing poses are carefully scrutinised, as they bring to light the more hidden connections between temperaments, passions and the signs they can produce, just as jurists must continuously examine the motion of the body, facial expressions and any gesture, if they are to judge well. Allegories of Justice also reveal the motion of the soul.

Manifestations of judicial impartiality have attracted scrutiny in legal scholarship for centuries. Yet, we lack studies of how judicial postures and gestures convey specific meanings and how they play a role in influencing and transmitting lay impressions of judicial values. The judge's sedentary posture is part of his gestural ethics and is said to reveal his judicial temperament. This chapter aims at restoring the symbolic meanings of these postures: Lady Justice is not always depicted sitting down; far from it. Standing, animated by a warrior virtus or a desire to flee, Justitia lends herself to surprising metamorphoses. After a discussion of Justice's temperament, this chapter considers images of Justice seated, then standing, then walking, before finally leaving the court for the public square and the quotidian life of the city.