Banksy Mural features at Royal Courts of Justice

On the morning of 8 September 2025, a new stencilled mural appeared on the wall of the Queen's Building at the Royal Courts of Justice. The work, claimed by Banksy on Instagram with the characteristically terse caption "Royal Courts of Justice. London", depicts a wigged and robed judge striking a prone protester with a gavel, while the protester clutches a blood-splattered placard. Within hours, court security had screened the work behind black plastic sheeting and metal barriers; within days, it had been removed altogether.

For a firm of lawyers, the mural raises questions that go well beyond the aesthetic. Is this art? Is it political speech? Is it criminal damage? Is it all three at once? And what protections, if any, does the law afford to a piece of work that exists only because it was placed, without permission, on the wall of one of the country's most significant buildings?

Criminal damage and the listed building dimension

The starting point is straightforward enough. Under section 1 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971, a person who, without lawful excuse, destroys or damages property belonging to another, intending to do so or being reckless as to whether such property would be damaged, commits an offence. Spray paint applied to the exterior of a Grade I listed building, without the consent of the building's custodian, falls squarely within that definition. The fact that the resulting image may be aesthetically striking, or that the open market might value it at a substantial sum, does not alter the analysis: damage is damage.

The position is, if anything, more stringent in the case of the Royal Courts of Justice itself, which is a Grade 1 listed building. Section 9 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 makes it an offence to execute, or cause to be executed, works for the alteration of a listed building in a manner which affects its character as a building of special architectural or historic interest, without the appropriate authorisation. HM Courts and Tribunals Service, as custodian of the building, has a statutory obligation to preserve the building's original character, which is precisely the reasoning it gave for removing the work.

Art, ownership, and moral rights

If the criminal law analysis is relatively clear, the intellectual property position is rather more interesting. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, original artistic works attract copyright protection from the moment of creation, regardless of whether their creation was lawful. Banksy, as the author of the work, would in principle own the copyright in the image and could in principle assert that copyright against unauthorised reproduction.

Whether he would do so is another matter. Banksy's well-known anti-copyright posture ("copyright is for losers") complicates any attempt to enforce his rights through the courts, since formal enforcement would require him to step out of anonymity. There is also the awkward question of whether the courts would entertain an enforcement action by a claimant who created the underlying work in the course of committing a criminal act, a question on which English law has not yet given a definitive answer.

Moral rights, separately preserved by Chapter IV of the 1988 Act, add another layer. The author of a copyright work has the right to be identified as such, and the right to object to derogatory treatment of the work. The removal of a mural is not, on its face, a "treatment" in the sense the Act contemplates; it is an erasure, not a modification. But the boundary is not entirely settled, and the question of what an artist may do when a building's owner simply scrubs the work away is one that street artists and their lawyers have wrestled with for years.

Expression, dissent, and the public space

Finally, there is the free expression dimension. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, given effect in domestic law by the Human Rights Act 1998, protects the right to freedom of expression, including artistic and political expression. The protection is not absolute and does not exempt the speaker from ordinary criminal law, but it does inform how the law is enforced and how the courts approach prosecutions of this kind. A mural that comments, however bluntly, on the exercise of state power is, on any reasonable view, a political expression of the kind Article 10 was designed to protect.

So, art or vandalism?

In strict legal terms, the answer is probably both. The mural is, in all likelihood, a criminal act under the 1971 Act and an unauthorised alteration of a listed building under the 1990 Act. It is also, simultaneously, an original artistic work in which copyright subsists, and an act of political expression engaging Article 10. These categories are not mutually exclusive; they are simply different legal lenses applied to the same set of facts.

What the episode usefully demonstrates is that the legal questions provoked by street art, questions of property, authorship, expression, and the limits of state power, remain genuinely unsettled, and are likely to keep lawyers, artists, and building custodians arguing for some time yet.