There is a bench for whoever has the most time on their hands, a gallery for anyone who happens to be passing the potatoes, and a single chair, set fractionally lower than the others, for whoever has been chosen that evening to explain himself.
No summons is ever served. The court prefers to begin with a question that is not a question at all. "And what is it, exactly, that you do all day?" "How is that going, that thing of yours?" The tone is light, almost tender, the tone of a doctor pressing gently on the spot he already knows is sore. It is often introduced with "don't take this the wrong way," which is a reliable sign that it has been carefully wrapped in the wrong way and tied with a bow.
A seasoned ear learns to hear the gavel before it falls. The giveaway is not hostility, which would at least be honest, but a sort of solicitous curiosity that already knows its conclusion and is merely looking for a respectable route there. The verdict has been drafted in advance. The proceedings are ceremonial, like a coronation, or a wedding at which everyone already knows the groom has debts.
What makes the chair so effective is a fact so plain it is almost never noticed: it only works if one sits in it. Generations of good manners have trained the decent and well brought up to keep every door ajar, to explain, to be reasonable, to offer a full account to anyone who asks in a reasonable voice. It is a noble habit and a disastrous strategy, because every explanation is entered into the record. Every justification becomes evidence, every footnote an exhibit. The more eloquent the defence, the longer the trial runs, and in these courts the trial is the point. Whoever explains has accepted the court's authority, and whoever accepts that authority has handed the gavel to the bench. The control was never in the question. It was in the agreement to answer it.
Fortunately, the history of polite society records a number of graceful exits, practised by people who would never dream of calling them strategies.
There is, of course, an irony the court would prefer to leave unrecorded. The most enthusiastic prosecutors are very often defendants themselves, in some inner tribunal where their own case has been dragging on for decades. Convening a trial for someone else is, for them, the most respectable way to adjourn their own.
And so the evening goes on. The questions keep arriving in their best clothes. The chair stays where it was put, a little lower than the rest, admirably upholstered, and perfectly empty. Without a defendant, the court becomes something much less dangerous and much more tolerable: a dinner party, which is all it was ever meant to be.
