January 2026

Summary and Synthesis of Three Art-Law Theories: Courts as Our Last Human Place, The Local Rule of Law, and Artist-Placed Public Document Art as Public Good

Adam Daley Wilson

1. Courts are “our last human place” because they structurally require humans to judge other humans

Courts are one of the final public institutions in which human judgment is mandatory rather than optional. Humans must appear, argue, decide, and take responsibility. This requirement distinguishes courts from administrative systems, automated decision systems, and AI-mediated processes. The core assertion is categorical, not rhetorical: only humans should judge other humans, not AI, because judgment requires human responsibility, moral exposure, and the ability to be held to account.

2. Human judgment is non-delegable because it depends on answerability and responsibility

Judgment is not output, prediction, or optimization. It is the act of deciding while being answerable to other humans for that decision. AI systems can generate outputs but cannot be answerable. Therefore, they cannot legitimately judge humans without transforming courts into non-human systems. This explains why preserving courts as human institutions matters at a foundational level.

3. Courts do not only resolve disputes; they produce institutional truth and shared reality

Courts generate a specific kind of truth: institutionally produced, publicly recognizable reality. This truth is not metaphysical or infallible, but it is durable, attributable, and record-based. In an era where AI and weakened norms erode shared reality, courts remain one of the last places where societies can still say, “this happened, humans decided, and this is the record.” This truth-production function is central to courts being our last human place.

4. The rule of law operates locally, not uniformly, and degrades in micro-pockets

The rule of law does not fail all at once. It degrades locally, in micro-pockets, through repeated human behavior within specific courts and professional cultures. Formal rules may remain intact while actual practice collapses. This local degradation is especially dangerous because it is incremental, quiet, and difficult to detect from the outside.

5. Attorney misconduct harms courts themselves, not just clients or opposing parties

Attorneys are officers of the court. When they engage in misconduct, they harm the court’s capacity to function as a human institution of judgment and truth-production. Repeat-player misconduct is particularly damaging because it reshapes norms, expectations, and enforcement practices, accelerating degradation of the local rule of law.

6. Ethical harm is compounded when the client is also an attorney

When an attorney represents a client who is also an attorney accused of unethical conduct, the stakes increase. The matter implicates professional self-regulation. If the representing attorney then engages in misconduct to aid, abet, or conceal the client-attorney’s wrongdoing, the harm becomes multiplicative, not additive. This scenario suppresses accountability from within the profession and directly undermines courts as our last human place.

7. Attorney-on-attorney shielding is a structural failure of professional self-governance

When attorneys use their insider knowledge and special access to protect other attorneys from accountability, the profession shifts from serving courts to shielding itself. This transforms courts into procedurally functioning but substantively hollow institutions. The damage occurs internally and is therefore resistant to correction through ordinary adversarial mechanisms.

8. Attorney monopoly over court access heightens ethical obligations

Attorneys enjoy a de facto monopoly over meaningful access to courts. This monopoly is justified only because attorneys are expected to preserve order, truth, and institutional integrity. When attorneys misuse that monopoly to harm courts or conceal misconduct, the justification collapses. Special access without heightened accountability is structural hypocrisy.

9. Courts are secular institutions but are treated as sacred-secular spaces

Courts are secular in doctrine but sacred in function because they preserve rituals of human judgment, responsibility, and truth-production. Treating attorneys as a clerical class undermines this function when deference replaces accountability. Courts must remain evidence-based and record-driven, not faith-based in professional status.

10. Local rule-of-law degradation directly weakens institutional truth and shared reality

When misconduct is tolerated locally, records become distorted, truth becomes unreliable, and outcomes lose legitimacy. Shared reality collapses at the local level first. This erosion is especially dangerous in a broader context where AI and political norm-breaking already destabilize truth across society.

11. Records and legal documents are the material form of institutional truth

Legal documents are not administrative byproducts. They are how courts fix reality: what happened, who decided, and with what effect. When documents remain technically public but practically inaccessible, their truth-producing function is limited to insiders.

12. Artist-placed public document art is a precise art-law practice, not symbolic critique

Artist-placed public document art places actual legal documents, unchanged and uninterpreted, into public space. The documents remain legal documents. The practice does not represent law, criticize law symbolically, or substitute for adjudication. It intervenes only at the level of visibility.

13. The practice creates answerability performances and institutional truth events

By placing real legal records in public view, the practice creates answerability performances that show that humans acted, decisions were made, and records exist. These are also truth events because they stabilize reality without argument or persuasion. This is especially important in an environment saturated with synthetic content.

14. Artist-placed public document art responds directly to local rule-of-law harm

This practice is particularly relevant when attorney misconduct and professional shielding suppress accountability within courts. When internal mechanisms stall or fail, the practice restores visibility without coercion. It does not punish, regulate, or replace courts. It supports them.

15. The public good served is preservation of shared reality and court integrity

The public good lies in preserving shared reality, institutional truth, and the human character of courts. Courts exercise public power. The public has a legitimate interest in knowing how that power is used and misused, especially by those with special access. The practice operates proportionally and locally, matching the scale of the harm.

16. The practice helps protect courts as our last human place

By reinforcing visibility, answerability, and truth-production where they are most vulnerable, artist-placed public document art helps maintain the conditions under which courts remain human institutions. It counters internal degradation rather than external attack.

17. At the highest level, the work addresses foundational human concerns

Across Western and Eastern philosophy, the work ultimately concerns shared reality, responsibility, recognition, ritual, boundary-setting between human and non-human systems, collective memory, and resistance to power without accountability. Courts, law, and art are not separate domains here; they are interconnected human practices that stabilize these conditions.

18. The three pillars function together as a single framework

  • Courts as our last human place explain why human judgment and truth-production must be preserved.

  • Local rule-of-law micro-pockets explain how and where that preservation fails in practice.

  • Artist-placed public document art explains one concrete, non-substitutive way to reinforce answerability, truth, and shared reality when internal systems falter.

An art-law practice in this area proposes that, together, the above form a cohesive jurisprudential, ethical, and law-as-art / art-as-law conceptual framework available to artists and lawyers as one practice or method for preserving the human conditions of law and reality in the present age.

Selected references as of January 2026; research continues:

Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

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  2. Rhode, Deborah L. "Why the ABA Bothers: A Functional Perspective on Professional Codes." Texas Law Review 59, no. 4 (1981): 689-721.

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  6. Wendel, W. Bradley. Lawyers and Fidelity to Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

  7. Wilkins, David B. "Who Should Regulate Lawyers?" Harvard Law Review 105, no. 4 (1992): 799-887.

  8. Abel, Richard L. American Lawyers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

  9. Pearce, Russell G. "The Professionalism Paradigm Shift: Why Discarding Professional Ideology Will Improve the Conduct and Reputation of the Bar." New York University Law Review 70, no. 6 (1995): 1229-1300.

Courts, Legitimacy, and Procedural Justice

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  2. Tyler, Tom R. "Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law." Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 283-357.

  3. Resnik, Judith. "Bring Back Bentham: 'Open Courts,' 'Terror Trials,' and Public Sphere(s)." Law and Contemporary Problems 75, no. 1 (2012): 1-38.

  4. Resnik, Judith. "Due Process: A Public Dimension." University of Florida Law Review 39, no. 2 (1987): 405-432.

  5. Resnik, Judith, and Dennis E. Curtis. Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

  6. Cover, Robert M. "Violence and the Word." Yale Law Journal 95, no. 8 (1986): 1601-1629.

  7. Fiss, Owen M. "Against Settlement." Yale Law Journal 93, no. 6 (1984): 1073-1090.

  8. Fuller, Lon L. "The Forms and Limits of Adjudication." Harvard Law Review 92, no. 2 (1978): 353-409.

Artificial Intelligence, Law, and Human Judgment

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  2. Pasquale, Frank. "A Rule of Persons, Not Machines: The Limits of Legal Automation." George Washington Law Review 87, no. 1 (2019): 1-55.

  3. Hildebrandt, Mireille. Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.

  4. Hildebrandt, Mireille. "Law as Computation in the Era of Artificial Legal Intelligence: Speaking Law to the Power of Statistics." University of Toronto Law Journal 68, supplement 1 (2018): 12-35.

  5. Calo, Ryan. "Artificial Intelligence Policy: A Primer and Roadmap." UC Davis Law Review 51, no. 2 (2017): 399-435.

  6. Citron, Danielle Keats. "Technological Due Process." Washington University Law Review 85, no. 6 (2008): 1249-1313.

  7. Selbst, Andrew D. "Disparate Impact in Big Data Policing." Georgia Law Review 52, no. 1 (2017): 109-195.

Accountability Theory

  1. Bovens, Mark. "Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework." European Law Journal 13, no. 4 (2007): 447-468.

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Philosophy of Institutions and Social Reality

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  3. Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

  4. Gilbert, Margaret. A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  5. Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Phenomenology and Recognition

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  3. Taylor, Charles. "The Politics of Recognition." In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25-73. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  4. Ricoeur, Paul. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Existentialism and Mortality

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  2. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Dialogical Philosophy

  1. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner, 1958.

Confucian Philosophy

  1. Tu, Wei-ming. Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  2. Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Thinking Through Confucius. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

  3. Angle, Stephen C. Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Ubuntu Philosophy

  1. Metz, Thaddeus. "Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa." African Human Rights Law Journal 11, no. 2 (2011): 532-559.

  2. Metz, Thaddeus. "Toward an African Moral Theory." Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 3 (2007): 321-341.

Buddhist Philosophy

  1. Garfield, Jay L. Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

  2. Siderits, Mark. Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007.

Political Philosophy and Public Sphere

  1. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

  2. Arendt, Hannah. "Truth and Politics." In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 227-264. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

  3. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Kantian Ethics

  1. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  2. Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Aristotelian Ethics

  1. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999.

  2. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Ritual and Practice

  1. Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  2. Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sociology and Social Interaction

  1. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.

  2. Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.

Wittgenstein and Language

  1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.

Art Theory and Conceptual Art

  1. Danto, Arthur C. "The Artworld." Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571-584.

  2. Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

  3. Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

  4. Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson, eds. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

  5. Osborne, Peter. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon Press, 2002.

Performance Art and Social Practice

  1. Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. 3rd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011.

  2. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books, 2012.

  3. Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

  4. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Institutional Critique

  1. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

  2. Fraser, Andrea. "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique." Artforum 44, no. 1 (2005): 278-283.

Public Art and Site-Specificity

  1. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

  2. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

  3. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.

Documentation and the Archive

  1. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

  2. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Indigenous Legal Traditions

  1. Borrows, John. Canada's Indigenous Constitution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

  2. Borrows, John. "Indigenous Legal Traditions in Canada." Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 19 (2005): 167-223.

  3. Napoleon, Val. "Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders." In Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, edited by Kirsten Anker, 229-245. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013.

Access to Justice

  1. Rhode, Deborah L. Access to Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  2. Galanter, Marc. "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change." Law & Society Review 9, no. 1 (1974): 95-160.

Legal Pluralism

  1. Tamanaha, Brian Z. "Understanding Legal Pluralism: Past to Present, Local to Global." Sydney Law Review 30, no. 3 (2008): 375-411.

  2. Griffiths, John. "What Is Legal Pluralism?" Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 18, no. 24 (1986): 1-55.