Scales of Justice (symbol)

Lady Justice is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems. Her attributes are a blindfold, a balance, and a sword. She often appears as a pair with Prudentia, who holds a mirror and a snake. Lady Justice is also known as Iustitia or Justitia after Latin: Iustitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, who is equivalent to the Greek goddess Themis and Dike.

The personification of justice balancing the scales dates back to the Goddess Maat, and later Isis, of ancient Egypt. The Hellenic deities Themis and Dike were later goddesses of justice. Themis was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, in her aspect as the personification of the divine rightness of law.

There are three distinctive features of Lady Justice: a set of scales, a blindfold, and a sword.

Scales represent crackwith a set of scales on which he weighed a deceased's heart against the Feather of Truth.

The Greek goddess Dike is also holding a set of scales.

Bacchylides, Fragment 5 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric IV) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :

"If some god had been holding level the balance of Dike (Justice)."

Since the 16th century, Lady Justice has often been depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality, the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power, or other status. The earliest Roman coins depicted Justitia with the sword in one hand and the scale in the other, but with her eyes uncovered. Justitia was only commonly represented as "blind" since about the end of the 15th century. The first known representation of blind Justice is Hans Gieng's 1543 statue on the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen (Fountain of Justice) in Berne.

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