—Luiz Alberto Melo, Brazilian constitutional lawyer and legal analyst focusing on institutional theory, judicial legitimacy, and the symbolic dimensions of constitutional adjudication
Themis and the Logic of the Veil
Western legal imagination has long represented justice through the figure of Themis: blindfolded, impartial, distant from passions and contingencies. The veil is not an aesthetic accident. It expresses a fundamental institutional logic: justice derives its authority not from visibility, but from restraint. The legitimacy of adjudication traditionally depends on distance, silence, ritual, and controlled opacity.
In classical constitutional theory, courts are expected to operate as spaces of symbolic neutrality. Their authority rests on the perception that judges are not actors in the political arena, but custodians of procedures, precedents, and institutional continuity. Justice appears as a ritualized function, not as a spectacle.
As Pierre Bourdieu famously observed, symbolic power operates most effectively when it becomes invisible (Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 163: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674212788).
Aphrodite and the Sacrality of Exposure
The famous Aphrodite of Cnidus marked a civilizational rupture. It was the first monumental sculpture to represent a goddess fully nude, transforming what had been sacred distance into public visibility. The divine became an object of gaze. The sacred was aestheticized.
In cultural terms, Aphrodite inaugurates a logic of legitimacy through exposure. What is revealed gains value not by transcendence, but by visibility. Authority is no longer protected by ritual opacity, but produced through continuous public presence.
This symbolic shift offers a powerful metaphor for contemporary constitutional adjudication. Courts increasingly abandon the logic of Themis and progressively adopt the logic of Aphrodite: legitimacy through exposure, authority through presence, power through visibility.
From Ritual to Performance: Brazil and the Institutionalization of Judicial Visibility
In several constitutional systems, adjudication is no longer confined to the courtroom as a ritual space. It becomes a communicative performance, permanently mediated by mass media and digital platforms.
Brazil offers a paradigmatic example of the structural transition from judicial opacity to judicial hypervisibility. Since 2002, with the creation of TV Justiça, all sessions of the Supremo Tribunal Federal have been broadcast live on television and, more recently, on YouTube and other digital platforms (via the official channel of the Supremo Tribunal Federal or STF: https://www.youtube.com/@stf_oficial). Constitutional adjudication in Brazil thus operates under conditions of permanent public exposure, transforming judicial deliberation into a real-time media event. The judge is no longer a distant institutional figure but a permanent public actor, whose gestures, tone, opinions, and silences are consumed in real time.
This institutional design has produced a qualitative shift in the symbolic economy of judging. The courtroom is no longer merely a space of legal ritual and decision-making, but also a stage of political communication. Adjudication shifts from institutional ritual to communicative performance. The authority of the court begins to depend less on procedural coherence and more on symbolic capital accumulated through media presence. Indeed, individual justices have become recognizable public figures, frequently giving interviews, maintaining social media profiles, participating in international forums, and issuing statements outside the formal boundaries of judicial reasoning.
As a consequence, the authority of the Court is no longer sustained primarily by the opacity of its procedures and the impersonality of its rituals, but increasingly by visibility, narrative control, and public performance. Judicial legitimacy becomes partially dependent on media presence, discursive protagonism, and symbolic capital accumulated in the public sphere.
The Brazilian case thus illustrates a broader global tendency: courts are no longer shielded institutions operating behind the veil of procedural silence. They are embedded in an ecosystem of constant exposure, where authority must be continuously produced, communicated, and defended in front of a permanent audience.
Visibility and the Crisis of Judicial Authority
This transformation generates a structural paradox. The more visible the court becomes, the more fragile its symbolic authority tends to be. When judges are constantly exposed as individual personalities, they lose the protective anonymity of institutional roles.
Authority migrates from the office to the person. Legitimacy becomes personal, not institutional. Trust is no longer anchored in the court as an abstract entity, but in the perceived credibility of individual judges.
This dynamic produces a deep institutional tension: courts seek greater public legitimacy through visibility, but visibility erodes the very symbolic distance that historically sustained judicial authority. The judge becomes a public figure, a moral commentator, sometimes even a political actor.
Judicial power begins to resemble administrative or political power: permanently justified, permanently explained, permanently exposed.
Managing Visibility without Destroying Authority
The transition toward judicial visibility is, to some extent, irreversible. In contemporary constitutional democracies, courts cannot realistically return to the pre-media model of institutional silence. Transparency, public access, and communicative accountability have become structural features of modern adjudication (see Hood & Heald, Transparency: The Key to Better Governance? Oxford University Press, 2006: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transparency-9780199266991).
However, the central normative challenge is not whether courts should be visible, but how visibility should be institutionally managed so that it does not erode the very symbolic authority that sustains judicial legitimacy.
First, visibility must be institutional rather than personal. Public communication should be centralized and mediated by the Court as an institution, not by individual judges acting as autonomous political actors. The authority of the judiciary depends on impersonality; when the judge becomes a public personality, authority shifts from office to individual, from role to subject.
Second, courts must preserve zones of ritual opacity. Not every dimension of judicial activity should be absorbed by the logic of real-time exposure. Deliberative spaces, internal disagreements, and the formation of judicial reasoning require a degree of symbolic distance from immediate public scrutiny in order to preserve their epistemic and institutional integrity.
Finally, visibility must remain procedural, not performative. The public has the right to access judicial decisions and hearings, but not to transform judges into communicative protagonists competing for symbolic relevance in the political arena.
The risk, therefore, is not transparency itself, but the transformation of visibility into a substitute for authority. When courts seek legitimacy through exposure rather than through institutional ritual, they abandon the logic of Themis and embrace the logic of Aphrodite: authority grounded in appearance, not in symbolic distance.
The End of the Veil?
When the guardian of the Constitution requires constant public exposure to sustain legitimacy, the problem is no longer ethical. It is institutional.
The shift from Themis to Aphrodite represents a mutation in the foundations of constitutional authority. Justice ceases to be grounded in ritual distance and becomes dependent on communicative presence. The veil is removed. The body of the institution is revealed.
The question, therefore, is not whether courts should communicate with society. That is inevitable in contemporary democracies. The real question is whether constitutional adjudication can survive without symbolic opacity, without ritual distance, without institutional silence.
If justice becomes fully visible, permanently performative, and continuously personalized, it risks losing precisely what once made it authoritative: its capacity to speak from beyond the logic of the spectacle.
The paradox of modern constitutionalism may be this: in seeking legitimacy through exposure, courts may be dismantling the very symbolic architecture that once made their authority possible.
In trying to become Aphrodite, Themis may be dissolving herself.
Suggested citation: Luiz Alberto Melo, The Veils of Justice and the Aphrodite of Cnidus – Constitutional Adjudication between Ritual and Visibility, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Feb. 26, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-veils-of-justice-and-the-aphrodite-of-cnidus-constitutional-adjudication-between-ritual-and-visibility/