And funnily enough, this sculpture is not something cooked up by a misguided English law school or even the Law Society — it’s in Ohio
All right — so we’re obsessed with gavels at Legal Cheek.
Or more accurately, we are obsessed with outing the inappropriate use of gavel imagery to denote the UK legal system. Gavels, as any fool know, ain’t used in British courtrooms.
But they are in the US of A. And In Ohio they’ve got one with knobs on, as it were.
An occasional Legal Cheek contributor was recently in the “Buckeye state” — renowned for being the birthplace of seven US presidents, 24 astronauts and home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and felt obliged to draw our attention to this local artifact.
Plonked outside the state supreme court building in Columbus, the locals reckon this gavel is the biggest in the world. And at 30ft long, who’s arguing?
The steel sculpture — crafted by Professor Andrew Scott of the arts and humanities faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas — sits in a reflection pool outside the court building.
The gavel sculputre set Ohio taxpayers back to the tune of $200,000. But can one really put a price on art? And at least it is an accurate icon of US justice.