Jensen explains that
This essay considers a time-dishonored question: What, if anything, do judges have on under their robes? After serious research and thought, the author concludes that judges are-or, in an economically rational world, should be-minimalists.Jensen, in taking issue with Richard Posner and asking whether the judiciary should 'go commando', concludes that
Always subject to criticism, judges will often be scarred, but they should never be frayed.The Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe more succinctly explained that
Even if a judge today were inclined to push economic considerations to the side and take some notions of propriety into account (like "No nudes is good nudes"), it wouldn't matter in this context. Economic efficiency and propriety can coexist: as I have noted, a robe covers just about everything anyway. A judge can don a robe and not scare the horses while satisfying an economic preference for nudity sub roba. And silk, if that's what the robe is made of, feels so-o-o good. It might be better than nothing.
The bottom line in all of this? If you lift up many judges' robes, I predict you'll see lots of bottoms (before you're carted off to jail).
The Law is the true embodimentAn account from a legal costumier is provided in Legal Habits: A Brief Sartorial History of Wig, Robe & Gown (PDF) by Thomas Woodcock, with dissertation fodder in A History of Legal Dress in Europe (Clarendon Press, 1963) by W N Hargreaves-Mawdsley and 'Of Wigs and Gowns: A Short History of Legal and Judicial Dress in Australia' by Rob McQueen in 16(1) Law in Context (1999) 1-31. There is a more sardonic view in Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) by Paul Fussell, supplemented by Men in Black (Reaktion, 1995) by John Harvey and Seeing Through Clothes (Viking, 1978) by Anne Hollander.
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
