It is hard to tell, at first glance, what information is being imparted. A tuft of grass emerges from a rounded pile, which is sectioned like a table. Each blade is numbered (one to six) and the corresponding ledger seems to track legal cases, though its tightly packed headers are somewhat illegible. At the image’s top is an etching of a government building and the title of the journal: the Cerîde-i Adliye (Journal of Justice) for Şubat 1341 (February 1925). One suspects the artist of being more concerned with aesthetics than clarity — but perhaps, for the lawmen of the nascent Turkish Republic, the information contained here was immediately clear.

Their profession was relatively new. Until the nineteenth century, justice in the Ottoman Empire — as in all Muslim states at the time — had operated largely through the auspices of local kedi-s (judges). While punishments, especially capital ones, were enforced by magistrates delegated from the central authority, those judges were independent members of a pan-Islamic learned network, their rulings based on their school of Islamic jurisprudence rather than codified law. (So independent were they that in big cities, people would “shop” for the judge whose school might give you the best outcome — Hanbalis, for instance, were always a good bet for women seeking divorce.) According to Ottoman historian Kent F. Schull, the late nineteenth century saw the central government, partially though not entirely in response to pressure from its European allies, increasingly impose itself on these acephal networks: in the 1870s, it promulgated the Mecelle, the first governmental codification of Islamic jurisprudence and founded the Nizamiye (“Regular”) court system; while trained like their forerunners in Islamic law, those judges were ultimately responsible to the state, not God.

The Cerîde-i Adliye, originally called the Cerîde-i Mehakim (Journal of the Courts), was founded around the same time. Addressed to the workers of the new Nizamiye courts, it sought to ease the distribution of information around this novel system. Successively reorganized over the years, it survived the fall of the empire — and these striking covers, which seem to have only been printed for a few years after the establishment of the Republic in 1922, perhaps speak to the revolutionary spirit then afoot.

In matters of the law, Kemalist progressivism founded itself on European precedents. The grand civil law reforms of 1926 saw the Turkish Republic adopt the Swiss Civil Code more or less verbatim; the penal code was cribbed from the Italians. No half measures: sharʿiah (in Turkish, şeriat) was definitively out. The following year, the American international law expert Manley O. Hudson explained the rationale by saying that “the people should be made to feel that no half-hearted measures were being attempted. Nothing short of a revolution would satisfy. The brooms of Angora [Ankara] sweep clean. . . . The year of 1926 will go down in Turkish history as one of great legislative activity. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any other country, with the possible exception of Russia, has in modern times undertaken a program of law reforms so extensive.”

There is a way of reading these Cerîde-i Adliye covers for a similar, all-encompassing fervor for European modes of rationalization; to see them as aftershocks of Europe’s late-nineteenth-century mania for data visualization. Many Turkish republicans trained in France or Francophone Switzerland — Mahmut Esat Bozkurt (1892–1943), the Justice Minister who led the reforms, had done a PhD at the Université de Fribourg. One can imagine them in their classes, admiring Charles Joseph Minard’s (1781–1870) statistical map of Napoleon’s ill-fated Russian invasion, the “greatest information graphic ever made”, or even perhaps moved by the startling visualizations created by W.E.B. DuBois for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Recent experience, too, had demonstrated how directly graphical representations could affect nation-building: in 1919, Emmanuel de Martonne’s maps of the overlapping linguistic groups of Central Europe helped draw the more-or-less disastrous borders of post-imperial Austria-Hungary.

Yet as linked as they are to these European modes — histograms, scatterplots, star diagrams — they are as closely tied to Ottoman artistic traditions. Aesthetics aside, alphabet reform was still two years away, so the Turkish titles and issue numbers are written in Arabic script, and the 1926 issues declare a publishing date of 1341, despite the official switch to the Gregorian calendar earlier that year. An eighteenth-century manuscript of the great Ottoman jurist Ibrāhīm Ḥaḳḳī Efendi (d. 1780)’s scholarly almanac, the Maʿrifetnāme (“The Book of Gnosis”), similarly mixes graphs and text, European methods and Islamic. European tools could be used to create a singularly Turkish product: as with the Cerîde-i Adliye, so with the Republic.