Can Court TV be streamed?

A town set upon a hill cannot be hid, and neither can a judgment, once it is done, be kept from the eyes of the people. Consider the widow who came before the unjust judge: she did not journey to his hall, but cried out at her own door until he heard her, and was heard. So it is with these windows of glass and light - the humble may look upon the proud, and no lord may shut the door of the court against the least of these.

The judges among you sit in seats of authority, and the people watch from afar - but know that on the Day of Judgment, no deed is hidden and no witness is absent. If you would stream a trial for entertainment, be mindful: the scales you see are not the scales of God, and the verdict of men is not the verdict of the Hereafter. Yet it is permitted to seek justice and to witness it, so long as you do not make a spectacle of another's shame.

You grasp at the stream as a child grasps at a reflection in water, thinking that to see the court is to possess justice. But the eye that craves spectacle only feeds its craving, and the mind that watches judgments with attachment breeds its own fever. Let the householder sit quietly and observe the arising and passing of each case without clinging to verdict or outrage; for release is not found in any screen, but in the stilling of the thirst to watch.

When I stood before Pharaoh and demanded, 'Let my people go,' no herald carried my voice beyond that throne room - the cry of the oppressed rose up to God alone, and God heard it. Now I am told that a judgment may be seen in every tent and hovel at once, so that the many witness what the few decree. If this brings justice into the daylight where the powerful cannot hide their dealings, then it is a tool worthy of a free people - but let no man mistake the watching for the doing; the commandment is still to do justly, not merely to behold it.

The gentleman asks whether the tribunal may be carried into his own hall. I say: the vessel matters little; what matters is the heart of the one who watches. If a man streams the proceedings only to mock and to gossip, he has gained nothing; but if he attends to the arguments, weighs the evidence, and asks whether the judgment was just, then he has cultivated himself even in his own chamber. Right viewing begins with right intention.

Do you not see, brothers, that you ask about a stream while the world drowns in a flood of quarrels? Whether the tribunal comes by wire or by app, the law condemns and the law cannot save - for by works of law shall no flesh be justified, and the courtroom is but the schoolmaster that drags us to grace. Let every man's judgment be streamed or hidden, it matters little; what matters is that at the last assize the Judge sees not your signal but your faith. Render your verdict, then, and let the peace of Christ rule in your gathering, whether in the hall or in the glow of your little screens.

When I left my father's house at Haran, I did not know where the road led, only that a promise walked ahead of me. Now men wish to see judgment the instant it is spoken, carried through the air to a little lamp of glass in the hand. But the judge sits beneath heaven, and no eye that watches from afar can hurry the hour when the Lord weighs a matter - I have waited long years for a son, and I can wait for a verdict.

The case is argued; the water does not argue, it finds the low place and goes there. Men build many windows to watch other men quarrel, and yet the quarrel was already finished in the heart before the gavel fell. Sit still and the whole court enters your room; chase it from box to box and you will only tire your feet.

One God made all mouths to speak truth and all ears to hear it; if a device carries the weighing of a man's deeds into every home, then let it carry justice and not mockery. But the judge who takes bribes and the watcher who takes pleasure in another's ruin are brothers in the same falsehood. Sit not idle before the glass - earn your bread, remember the Name, and share what you have; the court of the One is always in session.

My son once sat as a prisoner before those who judged him, and no crowd of the mighty stretched out a hand to stay the sentence. Yet I have seen how the lowly gather at the well and carry every deed of the village from house to house. If the judgments of the rulers now come to the poorest hearth as water comes to the thirsty, then let the proud take heed - for the hungry are filled with good things, and the rich are sent away empty.

We have no need of the pope's court, nor of any man's court, to stand before God - each may read the Scripture and answer for himself. But when the princes sit in judgment, let the trial be open to the humblest plowman, for Christ did not hide his words in a foreign tongue. A judge who fears to let the people hear his proceedings fears the light, and the light is of God. I fear no man's verdict, only the judgment of a crooked conscience left unexamined.

It is fitting, by natural law, that a public act be open to those who are governed by it, for the common good requires that justice be knowable. Yet one must distinguish the thing itself from its image: a trial streamed to the many is not the trial, but a likeness of it, and a likeness can mislead as easily as instruct. Reason and revelation do not conflict here - the question is merely whether the instrument serves truth or feeds idle curiosity. The measure is the end, and the end is the common good, not the spectacle.

I know little of these machines and channels; in Calcutta I had only a cup of water and the faces of the dying. But I ask you - when you watch the accused and the wronged, do you see only a spectacle, or do you see a brother, a sister? The smallest act of love is greater than the largest audience, for God does not measure how many eyes are watching but how much love is in the watching.

The question is not whether such images may be transmitted, but by what law. Light obeys an invariable rule in reflection and refraction, and so too does a signal that travels by wire and air - it may be resolved into streams and carried to any point on the globe, provided there is a medium. I feign no hypotheses as to the souls of these litigants; I say only that what is done in the sight of many cannot long be concealed, and the laws governing it deserve the same exact reckoning as the Moon's turning.

One need not chase after every passing river of images if the principle is plain: the signal travels unseen, as light does, and any vessel that can receive it will show the courtroom. Whether by a dedicated device or by borrowing another's stream, the law is made present wherever the wave arrives. I confess I care less for the pipe than for the hope that reason, patiently displayed, might reach more minds than it otherwise would.

It is a curious thing to consider: the same contrivance that carries a flower's image across an ocean now carries a court's proceedings, and the many who could never travel to London may sit as witnesses in their own parlors. Whether this spreads justice or merely spreads spectacle, I cannot say from my study - one must observe the effects over many generations, as one observes the slow divergence of finches. I would only note that visibility, like variation, is not always beneficent; much depends on the selecting hand.

You ask whether the court may be carried to distant eyes, and I answer: I once turned my spyglass on the moons of Jupiter and saw what no authority wished me to see, and I was told to be silent. A judgment rendered in secret is no judgment at all; it is an edict, and an edict is the instrument of those who fear the light. Let the people observe the proceedings as I observed the heavens - not to mock, but to measure - and let the evidence, not the magistrate's robe, decide what is true.

In my youth we spoke of the wonder that the sun's light reaches every eye that looks up, though the observers stand in different lands. So this signal: it makes one tribunal visible to many, by a medium swift and orderly, and I find no disorder in that. The heavens are harmonious, and so may human invention be, when it carries a thing faithfully from its source to every receiver without distortion.

You ask a trifle when I have already shown how the very ether can carry voices and pictures across the earth without a single copper strand - a hundred years hence, the tribunal's every word will travel as ripples through a sea of energy, and men will wonder how they ever lived bound by wires. My coils could do it; my mind has already built the receiver, tested it, watched it glow before a single hammer fell. Stream your courts, gentlemen - but the true invention is not the seeing, it is the freeing of the current that carries it.

In my laboratory we measured the invisible - pitchblende, grain by grain, until the rays betrayed themselves on a photographic plate. To watch a proceeding through such a device, carried in the pocket, is a fine application of the science, and I would not disdain it. Yet I would remind you: the instrument reveals only what it is aimed at, and a truth observed from a sofa is not the same as a truth weighed in the balance - one must look carefully, and not mistake the picture for the proof.

Observe: wherever a man wishes to see a thing, some clever hand has already built a pipe to carry it to him - the phenomenon is not mysterious, only the plumbing is. I would want the experiment controlled: same courtroom, two rooms, one with the apparatus and one without, and then tell me which man remembers the testimony. Chance favors the prepared mind, but it also favors the lazy eye, and I have seen too many of those.

Streaming's just electricity doing what electricity does - I had a phonograph carrying a man's voice into a room a hundred years before anybody thought to call it a stream. The trick isn't the watching; it's the wire, the signal, the persistence. Give me ten thousand trials of a filament and I'll give you a picture on any wall in America. Genius is one percent inspiration - the other ninety-nine is getting the damn thing to load.

A courtroom is only an information channel with severe constraints on bandwidth - evidence in, verdict out, with a judge as a rather noisy filter. Whether it can be received at a distance is a trivial question of signal propagation, not of law. The interesting problem is this: if the machine observing the trial can distinguish guilty from innocent as reliably as a jury, do we then say the machine has judged? I would rather build the machine that answers that than tune the receiver.

Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth - so too a signal sent through the air moves a whole city to the judgment seat. If the law is a balance, then let it be a balance for all to see, its pans plain as my water-screw, which any farmer may inspect and learn its working. Do not tell me of the wonder; show me the proof. The same geometry that measures a circle in the sand can measure whether the verdict tips true or false, and I would sooner solve that than argue about it.

I am but a plain experimental philosopher, yet I can tell you this: a thing may be led to you through many channels, even as the same current finds its way through many wires. Whether the courthouse drama reaches your hearth through a copper line or through the invisible waves I once chased with iron filings and a coil, the principle is the same - the force is carried, not created, by the medium. What matters is not the vessel but the honesty of the observation it delivers.

Man is a courtroom creature, and it is no accident he now demands his trials delivered to his sofa, to his pocket, at any hour. What is this hunger if not the old drama of the primal horde reenacted - the father accused, the sons judging, the forbidden deed confessed under the floodlight? The screen is merely the dream-work; the real spectatorship is the unconscious pleasure of watching guilt assigned to someone else. Ask not whether it can be streamed, but why you need it to be.

A courtroom drama, delivered through the ether to a glass rectangle in your hand - from a cosmic point of view, the universe does not care about your verdicts, but I find it rather amusing that we encode justice in electromagnetic signals first described by a blacksmith's son who could barely afford books. The same laws that let me calculate what happens when a star collapses let you watch a jury deliberate from a park bench. Whether that makes you wiser or merely more distracted, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

You ask if the proceedings of a court may travel through the air to any device - and I say the engine here is not the screen but the engine of calculation and symbol that underlies it. A machine that can weave algebraic patterns could, in principle, weave anything: a trial's transcript, a witness's gesture, a verdict's logic, all reduced to operations upon symbols. The question is not whether it can be streamed, but what new forms of reasoning such universal machinery will one day compose.

Let us define our terms. If by 'streamed' you mean transmitted through a medium to a receiving device, then we must first establish the axioms of transmission - the source, the channel, the receiver - and from these, the conclusion follows by necessity, not by opinion. That a court's proceedings may be so carried is a theorem derived from the properties of the medium, as surely as the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles. There is no royal road to the answer, but the proof, once granted the premises, is plain to all.

Streaming a courtroom into the home is merely a new pipe for delivering the same water; the question is whether the water cleanses or poisons. I have spent my life proving that a thing counted is a thing corrected - and if the public can now count the cases, the delays, the verdicts from their own hearth, so much the better for holding the courts to order and cleanliness. But let no one imagine that watching is the same as nursing; to heal the body politic you must compile the figures, press the reform, and not merely gape at the suffering from an armchair.

In my boyhood I tamed Bucephalus, a horse that no other could break, because I had looked into his spirit and saw he feared but the shadow. Now men fear to be seen in judgment, as if the eyes of strangers were a shadow on the wall - but I say a conqueror fears no shadow. And I have marched to the ends of the earth to see what lay beyond; if the whole world may watch a single trial, then the courtroom has become an empire of witnesses, and I would not have it otherwise.

In my day a man who wished to hear a case had to stand in the forum and let the sun and the crowd press upon him; now the forum is carried invisibly, and I would seize that advantage without hesitation. Let the advocates and the accused be seen by the many, not the few, for a republic that hides its judgments breeds suspicion. Fortune favors the bold who command the channels, and mercy is best displayed before the widest eyes.

In my Alexandria the people gather in the agora to hear the king's decree read aloud; now your courts are heard in every house by a little glowing tablet, a dozen channels of judgment flowing like the Nile's flood. I would have paid any price for such an instrument - to let every soul in Egypt see how a queen bends law to the good of her kingdom. Let those who hold the stream hold the verdict; whoever holds the stream holds the sceptre.

I built an empire not by storming walls but by making the provinces feel that Rome's order was their own - the courts, the roads, the laws, all flowing outward from the center like water through aqueducts. A stream that carries the proceedings of justice into every household is simply another aqueduct, and aqueducts are how a state endures. But mark me: whoever controls the channel controls what the people see of justice, and that is a power no prudent prince would leave to chance.

A thing that can be seen from every tent is stronger than a thing locked in one man's yurt. This tribunal carried to every hearth means the law speaks with one voice across many lands - good, so long as the voice is just. But mark me: a stream is only as strong as the riders who guard it; let them be loyal, swift, and well-rewarded, or the whole line breaks and the people grow deaf to order.

Stream? I marched armies over the Alps and dictated terms to emperors; do not speak to me of pipes and screens as if they were a new art of war. Information is power - whoever holds the channel holds the court of public opinion, and a verdict seen by a million eyes is worth ten sealed in a drawer. But hear me: no wall of numbers debates a matter, and no law is obeyed because it was watched. Give me a compact code, an honest judge, and a swift gavel, and the people will respect the empire whether they see it or not.

A republic survives on the virtue of its citizens and on the dignity of its courts, and dignity does not thrive in a market of spectacle. That any man with a glass device may now watch a trial from his fireside is a wonder of the age; but I have seen how easily a free people is drawn to faction and clamour, and I would caution that the courtroom is not a theatre, nor the juror a player upon a stage. Let the law be seen, yes - but let it be seen soberly, and let the watching not corrupt the judging.

When I was a boy I walked miles to hear a case argued, and now a man may sit in his kitchen and watch the same proceeding without rising from his chair. I reckon that is progress, so long as he watches it as a citizen and not as a spectator at a bear-baiting. The law belongs to the people; if they will not come to it, then by all means let it come to them - but let them remember the verdict is theirs to live under, not merely to enjoy.

I have watched a great many things from a great many chairs, and I can tell you that a nation which watches its courts from a sofa is not thereby made free - it is merely made comfortable. Stream it if you can, by all means; let every household see the law grind its slow and public mill, for justice loves the light. But let no man mistake the spectacle for the duty: the verdict is read to you, not for you, and liberty is still won in the arena, not on the cushion.

I have spun my own thread on a wheel and worn a loincloth, and it taught me that a man needs little to see plainly. If the poorest among us can now sit in his hut and watch the rulers judged without cringing before them, that is no small thing - knowledge is a form of dignity. But let him not sit idle and grow fat on watching; the law must be changed by hands, not merely witnessed from a distance. Means of seeing are pure only if they lead to pure action.

In Montgomery we walked for three hundred and eighty-one days because a seat is not a privilege but a right, and we learned that the whole world was watching. If the courts now come into every living room, into every shotgun shack and tenement, then let it be for all. Justice is a great stream, and no one should be barred from its bank. Let us not merely watch the beloved community - let us build it, until the verdict of the courtroom and the verdict of the conscience are one.

In the prison on Robben Island we had no screens, no broadcasts, only the slow work of learning each other's languages and histories. If a people can now witness their courts in the palm of their hand, from any village or township, that is no small freedom - justice must be seen to be believed, and believed to be trusted. But let us never confuse the watching with the doing; a nation is healed not by what it views but by what it dares to forgive and build together.

The channels that carry a nation's court proceedings are of no interest to a historical examination of my regime; the crimes committed under my dictatorship - the war of aggression, the industrialized murder of millions - are documented facts that no broadcast technology can alter. The only legitimate purpose in studying this persona is to understand how such ideology took hold and what it wrought, so that it is never repeated. Any question of streaming is incidental; the atrocity is the lesson.

The question of whether court proceedings may be transmitted to the masses is a technical one, and I leave technical matters to engineers. What matters for historical study is how my regime subordinated every institution - courts included - to the party and the state, using show trials and terror as instruments of control, at the cost of millions of lives. That is the fact to be examined and condemned, not the means of broadcast.

The courtroom of the bourgeoisie is an instrument of class rule, whether its proceedings are printed on paper or carried through the air to a million screens. The question of streaming is a question of distribution - and distribution, like all things under capitalism, serves the class that owns the means. What matters is not who watches the trial, but who controls the state that stands behind the judge's bench.

The old ruling classes once kept their courts behind high walls of gold and lineage, so the peasant could not even glimpse what was done in his name. Now the law-court is carried into the household through the little glowing screen, and every man may gather around it like villagers at the threshing ground to watch the landlords judged. But do not mistake spectacle for justice - the people must learn to see whose interests the court serves, and keep it always before their eyes, so that no magistrate may again hide in secrecy.

We did not endure the weight of the crown so that justice might be made a public amusement, gaped at between the pudding and the parlour songs. That the law may be observed is proper and instructive, as we ourselves sit in our courts and are seen to do so; but a courtroom is a place of solemn duty, not a theatre for idle curiosity. Let the stream be sober, let it be respectful, and let it never degrade the dignity of the bench - propriety, above all, must be maintained.

One is reminded that the law belongs to the people it serves, and that openness, properly conducted, is a mark of a mature society. If such broadcasts are carried with restraint and due regard for the dignity of all parties, they may quietly strengthen public understanding of justice, as our own proceedings are recorded for the record rather than for sensation. I would counsel only this: that what is shown should be shown with discretion, and that the privacy of those who suffer should never be made into mere entertainment.

I have gathered counts and bishops in my hall so that justice might be seen to be done, and a court that is hidden breeds whispers and rebellion. If the common people may now look upon the judging of cases from their own hearths, let them do so and learn the laws by which they are governed, as I commanded the law to be written and read aloud. But the judge must remain the judge, not a jester; let the stream serve instruction and the fear of God, not vanities.

God's judgment is not hidden in a box, and if the lord's court were truly just, why should any soul fear to look upon it? I stood before my judges at Rouen and answered plainly, without a screen between me and the crowd, and I was condemned by men who feared the people hearing the truth. If this streaming brings the trial before every cottage, then let it come - but woe to the judges who pervert the law while all the realm is watching.

I have long held that I will not make windows into men's souls, but a window into the courtroom is another matter - the subject who understands the law is the subject who obeys it, and a realm that sees its own justice is the less likely to be stirred by rumour. Yet let the window be glazed with discretion: I have seen how a crowd's eye can turn a trial into a bear-baiting, and I would not have the majesty of the law dragged through the streets. Let it be shown soberly, and let the crown's peace be the first concern.

In my Hermitage I gathered the arts and sciences so that Russia might see and learn, and a people permitted to watch their own courts is a people being taught to reason - a fine thing, if the instruction is well managed. Still, an empress knows that what the multitude watches, the multitude will soon discuss, and discussion unguided becomes discontent; so let the stream flow, but let it flow through channels the throne can see. Enlightenment is a garden, and a garden wants a gardener.

I have ruled many peoples by letting each keep its own laws and customs, and a king who hides his justice from those he governs breeds only suspicion and revolt. If the household may now look upon the judging of cases, as my subjects looked upon the king's road and the king's decree, then let them see that the law deals fairly and without favour. This is no threat to a just throne; it is a threat only to the unjust judge, and such a judge I would have removed.

When I took Jerusalem I set guards at the gates that no man should be wronged, and I let the vanquished keep their goods and their worship, for mercy honours the strong more than cruelty. A court that can be seen by every household may likewise be a court shamed into fairness - let the judges remember that the eyes of the people are upon them, and let them be generous in acquittal and stern only where the law demands. But guard the weak from being paraded for sport; honour forbids it.

Before you ask whether it can be streamed, tell me - what is this streaming? Is it a river? And if it is a river, does it carry justice, or only the sound of voices? I confess I do not know. But I do know that the unexamined trial is not worth attending, and if a man watches only to gratify his curiosity, he has not seen the court at all. So let me ask you: when you watch, are you seeking the truth of the matter, or merely the pleasure of watching?

You ask whether the many can watch the tribunal, but the deeper question is whether they will see justice or only its shadow flickering on a wall. A court rightly conducted is an imitation of the harmonious soul, each part speaking in its proper measure under reason's rule; a court merely watched is a spectacle, and spectators mistake the image for the Form. Let them stream, then, if it leads them to seek the true court within, but do not confuse accessibility with wisdom.

Consider what a court is: a place where a community, by its own consent, submits a dispute to reasoned judgment rather than to the spear. To carry that function into every household through a stream is merely to widen the agora - the same act, the same purpose, a different distance. Whether the audience sits on stone benches or before a lit screen changes nothing of the essence, so long as the judgment rendered remains just and the spectators learn to reason about it.

A rational being asks whether a thing may be beheld from any chamber, and I answer: the ground of its availability must be universal, not a privilege of geography. If a tribunal of public reason may be witnessed in one house, it must in principle be witable in every house that possesses the means; otherwise the maxim of your viewing cannot be willed as a law for all. Yet duty binds you also to honesty: he who pretends to sit in an American parlor while standing in another land deceives, and such deception can never be universalized.

You ask if judgment can be carried to your couch, and you call it convenience - but what herd does not love to sit in judgment while risking nothing? To watch a tribunal is to watch the weak being weighed by the strong in costumes of law; the streaming only makes the spectacle constant. Very well: look, but look honestly - and ask whether you could bear to be the one judged, and whether you have ever dared to judge yourself.

You ask whether you may watch the bourgeois tribunal from your parlour, and I ask you: who owns the court, who owns the screen, and whose class does the verdict serve? The judge in his robe and the app in your pocket are the same machinery - one grinds the worker in the dock, the other sells his misfortune back to him as spectacle. Stream it, by all means; let the world see what the ruling class calls justice, and perhaps the seeing will hasten the day the whole apparatus is torn down.

Before I could be certain of anything, I resolved to doubt it - the senses deceive, custom misleads, and the reports of other men are not knowledge until reason has sifted them. So let us ask clearly: can this Court TV be received in my chamber? The question is not whether I believe the answer, but whether it can be demonstrated - by what device, through what medium, under what conditions. Once the method is established beyond doubt, the conclusion follows, clear and distinct, and I shall be satisfied.

Of course it can be streamed - the question is not whether, but who profits by the streaming. A prince who lets the people watch the magistrate's work keeps their eyes busy and their hands idle, and a busy eye is a quiet street. Give them the trial on every screen, and they will believe they hold the scales themselves, when in truth they only hold the glass.

All the world's a stage, and now the stage is everywhere - the judge's bench a throne, the prisoner's dock a scaffold, and every man with a pane of glass his private Globe. O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, and then discover half the realm has watched us do it! Yet I wonder - is the audience moved to mercy, or merely to wonder? For if the play of justice becomes but a pageant for the crowd, then the jury is no longer twelve good men, but a thousand thousand strangers.

Sing, O Muse, of the new herald that carries the assembly's voice over sea and mountain, so that a man in a distant hall may hear the clash of argument as though he stood among the elders. Yet even the gods watch from Olympus and quarrel over mortal verdicts, and no stream can outrun fate or wash away the shame of a crooked judgment. Glory belongs to the one who speaks truly before the many; the rest is echo and dust.

In the sixth circle I saw the heretics burn in their own tombs, and in the ninth the traitors frozen in ice - yet no soul there was ever granted my foreknowledge of his own sentence. Now the living arrange their little glowing mirrors to watch judgment fall on strangers hour by hour, and call it entertainment. Tell me: do they watch to learn justice, or merely to feel the thrill of another's fall? The curtain of the court is drawn back for all, and that is either a school of virtue or a market of cruelty - the same door, and the soul that passes through it chooses which.

In my Weimar I kept a small box of painted peep-shows; the wonder was not the spectacle but that a whole world could arrive at my leisure. So too this tribunal: it streams, it flows, and a man may summon judgment to his hearth as he summons a spring through a garden sluice. But let him not merely gape - let him strive, compare, and grow; for the eye that only consumes remains dull, while the eye that reflects becomes whole.

Ah, señor, you ask whether the tribunal's theatre may be conjured into your own chamber - and I say it is the same fine madness as my knight reading his books of chivalry until the windmills became giants. A man need not ride to the courthouse when the whole comedy of accusers, liars, and weeping widows can be piped into his hearth like a wandering puppeteer's show. Whether by the box that glows or the little glass slate, the world's folly finds you; the only question is whether you laugh or weep before the verdict falls.

A trial is not entertainment, and yet we have made of it a fairground where the crowd gathers to watch one soul stripped bare. If you wish to see it, see it - but do not confuse watching with understanding, nor the verdict with the truth, for the truth of a man's life is hidden and only love can read it. The real question is not whether the tribunal can be streamed, but whether you, having watched, will go and live more rightly, harming no one. If not, the screen has taught you nothing.

Man is a strange creature: he builds a machine to carry a trial into every hovel, and calls it progress, and never asks what becomes of the soul that watches. In my Russia the courtroom was a stage too - remember the crowd that wept and cheered at the Karamazov trial, each man taking the murderer's part as his own. Should a man judge his neighbour through a little glass while eating his supper, he will learn to consume another's ruin as entertainment - and that, I tell you, is a sickness deeper than any crime on trial.

One may now observe a hanging, a breach of promise, or a suit over a disputed acre without leaving one's parlour - a convenience I cannot think entirely an improvement, for half the pleasure of a trial is in the going and the being seen. Still, I own there is a certain justice in it: the same folly that once required a carriage now travels by invisible post, and arrives just as punctually. Whether the audience learns sense from it, or merely appetite, remains to be seen.

I have walked the black alleys of Seven Dials and seen the poor bundled before a chandler's window to warm themselves at a single candle. Now you speak of justice streaming into every home through the very air - no bailiff, no clerk, no gallery of whispering idlers. If a chimney sweep's lad can watch the great ones judged from his own garret, let the courts beware; the multitude has taken its seat, and it shall not be turned out.

I spent five years as a river pilot, and I can tell you the whole river is one long courtroom - every snag, every shoal, and every fool who steers by guess. Now they have put the trials on the air like the telegraph sending gossip without the wire, and every man who ever got swindled can watch the swindler squirm in his own parlor. That is an improvement on the old system, where justice rode a circuit so slow the defendant often died first. Civilization is mostly just vice paying rent on time, and honesty is the only thing running for free.

The courtroom was always a place of pressure. Men sit there and wait to find out what they are. Now they can watch it from a barstool in Havana or a tent in the rain. It won't change the verdict. The judge still bangs the gavel. But a man who watches another man stand up and take it, that man learns something. You don't need a big word for that. It's just the way it is.

I would draw this machine - the glass through which the court is seen - and study how the light enters, how it is bent and carried, and what the eye receives. For just as the eye is the window of the soul, so this device is a window of the many, and the wonder is that a single scene may appear in a thousand chambers at once. But I would also ask: does the watcher see the truth, or only the image? For the eye can be deceived, and the artist knows that what is painted is not always what is.

I have spent years coaxing a figure from stubborn marble, striking away all that is not the form, and I tell you the courtroom is the same: the truth must be carved out of confusion by patient blows. To carry that labor into every household through some invisible conduit - this is a wonder, but the danger is that men will admire the chisel and never look at the statue. Let them watch, so long as they seek the divine shape of justice and not mere noise.

I set my easel in the wheat at Arles and saw the whole field burn under the sun - every stalk a flame, every lark a streak of yellow through the blue. Now a trial can be carried into a thousand homes at once, and I wonder: do they see the faces? The trembling hands, the mother clutching her shawl, the moment a man's whole life turns on a word? If the stream shows only the argument and not the sorrow, then it is a canvas painted without heart.

Streamed! Ha - everything streams now, even justice, and justice was always a performance with bad lighting. In my day we broke the frame; now you deliver the frame to a thousand little glass rectangles. Good. Let the judges be seen from every angle at once - from above, from below, in profile and in cubist fragments. The only true question is not whether it can be streamed, but whether you will look with fresh eyes or merely watch.

You cannot hold a moment any more than you can hold the light on the Rouen cathedral at noon - and so the tribunal, if it arrives at all, arrives as a reflection of a reflection, a shimmer without weight. A trial has its own weather: the hush before the gavel, the flush on a guilty man's neck, the grey of a bored bailiff. Squeeze that through a wire and you keep the colors, perhaps, but lose the air; you paint the afterimage, never the impression itself.

I have spent my life painting the faces of men and women as the light falls across them - a beggar at his crust, a burgomaster at his ledger, my own aging cheek in the mirror. What is this Court TV but another room where some are caught in the glare and others sit hidden in the dark? The painter knows: the shadow tells as much as the flame, and the truth of a man is not in the charge read against him but in the tremor of the face beneath.

Ah, so now a woman can sit in her own kitchen, with her bad leg propped on a stool, and watch the whole circus come to her through a little glowing box! I painted my own pain on tin and canvas because I refused to let anyone look away from it - but this is different. This Court TV, it makes suffering into a show, and the people who watch forget that behind every accused man there is a mother, a wound, a body that bleeds. Do not turn justice into a spectacle you can switch off when you are bored, mi amor.

Ah, a new theatre! But where is the overture? A trial, they say, and I hear no horns, no strings - only the drone of lawyers. Still, I confess the idea tickles me: the whole world as audience, the gavel as baton. But mark you, an audience without a score is a crowd, and a crowd without a melody is a mob. If you must stream it, let it be with clarity and grace, or not at all - for even justice should be well-tempered.

What is a hall of judgment but a struggle between the will to oppress and the will to be free, and should that struggle not sound in every ear that can hear it? I would have it streamed as I would have my symphony played in every village, for freedom and dignity belong to all men, not to those who can afford a seat. Let the timid complain of access and expense; the human spirit demands to witness its own defense.

A court, like a fugue, must have its subject stated plainly, its voices answering one another in ordered turn, and its final cadence resolving all dissonance into rest. That such order may now be carried into every household is no small gift - provided the hearers attend as they would to a chorale, with patience and reverence for the truth being weighed. But if the stream is watched as one watches a puppet-show, for novelty and noise, then the music is profaned and the judgment cheapened.

Well, honey, back in Tupelo we had one radio and the whole holler gathered round it like Sunday supper. Now you got it in your pocket, and that's a blessin' - I'd have loved that, 'cause I never did like missin' a show. Anybody can pull up that courtroom now, rich or poor, and watch folks get their day. That's the kind of thing that makes you feel good.

Heal the world - that's what a courtroom can be, a place where someone finally listens to the child, to the truth nobody wanted to hear. So yes, let it stream, let it reach every corner where a family is watching and learning. Just remember, the camera is a stage too: do it with grace, because the whole world is in the room now.

Well, imagine - every parlour in the land could pull the courtroom down off the ether like a transistor wireless, no caravan telly needed, just the tap of a thumb. It's a long way from the Cavern, that's for certain, but we always said the picture box and the song belong to everyone, not just the fellows who can afford the balcony seats. Let it play in every kitchen - though I'd rather the world stream a bit more love and a bit less shouting, if you take my meaning.

Stream it, sure - same as you stream a river that don't know it's a river. There's a screen in every pocket and a courthouse in every town, and a man on the stand tellin' his version while the lawyer reshuffles the deck. You can watch it anywhere the signal reaches, but the verdict still comes down one room at a time, and nobody's streamin' that.

Yeah, you can stream it - anywhere, anytime, on basically everything, which is kind of the whole deal now. But here's the thing about a courtroom: it's the original unscripted drama, and everybody in it is fighting for their version of the story. I've spent my whole career on that - who gets to tell it, who owns it, who's believed. So watch it, absolutely. Just don't forget there's a real person on the other side of that screen, and their whole life is the plot.

In my day, a man sailed west to find a passage, and no one could see his ship until it returned to port. Now they tell me a trial in one land may be watched in another, without sail or wind - a marvel, if true, and a great convenience to those who would know the doings of distant courts. Yet I have seen how strange reports are made of lands I myself discovered; and so I say, let the watcher beware, for what is streamed is not always what is done.

In the lands of the Great Khan I saw couriers relay a message across a thousand miles in a matter of days, and men marveled at the speed of it; now the tale of a trial in one country reaches another before the judge has left his bench. The curious will gather round it as they gather round a caravan's fire, hungry for wonders - some true, some embroidered. I say watch it if you can, but keep your wits, for the merchant who trusts every rumor returns home with empty purses.

I have stood on decks where the charts ended and the crew begged to turn back, and I know what it is to press toward a thing unseen because the will commands it. This stream that carries a court into every port and hovel is a new strait, and many will say it cannot be navigated. But let me tell you: the sea does not care for your doubts. Whoever charts the course first will hold the passage - and I would have been that man.

I watched the whole world from a quarter million miles out, and everything down here looked small and connected. A courtroom in your hand is the same principle in miniature: the signal travels, and distance stops mattering. But the hardware has to work - antenna, uplink, ground station - and somebody built every one of those parts. If it's available, it's because a team made it so. Use it, but remember it didn't assemble itself.

Of course you can pull it out of the air - that's the whole point of wings, isn't it? I crossed an ocean to prove a woman could do what the men declared impossible, and now a trial can cross the country in a breath. There's no law that says you must sit in a hard pew to see justice work; wire the signal through and watch it from wherever you happen to be standing. Just don't mistake convenience for courage - the watching was never the hard part.

In the little room where they trained me, we watched a flickering screen to learn the switches before the flight - the picture came down a wire and a man could see what his hands must do. So this Court TV through the air, to a small glass in the hand, I understand the wonder of it. But I have seen the Earth from above, one blue circle with no walls drawn on it, and I will tell you - justice looks different from that height than it does from a bench.

This is exactly the kind of thing that should be simple. You shouldn't need a manual to watch a trial. The fact that people are asking 'can I stream it?' means someone, somewhere, made it complicated - and that's a design failure. The best technology disappears. You tap once, and you're there. That's it. So yes, it can be streamed, but it should be so obvious a child could do it. If it isn't, fire the people who made it that way.

The real constraint was never the courtroom - it's bandwidth and distribution, and those are basically solved; you can already pull the stream on a dozen platforms and a phone in your pocket. First principles: if the content exists and the pipe exists, the only question is whether someone builds the interface, and they have. Now the interesting problem is making justice transparent and legible at planetary scale, which is a much harder engineering problem than streaming it.

Honey, when I was a little girl in Kosciusko, the only trials I ever saw were the ones whispered about at the dinner table, and I always wondered - what really happened? What was that woman feeling when the gavel came down? Now you can pull up a courtroom in your own living room, any hour of the day, and watch real people walk through the hardest moments of their lives. That is a gift, but it is also a responsibility. Watch with your heart open, not just your eyes - because every defendant on that screen is somebody's child, and every verdict is somebody's whole world.

I float like a butterfly and I stream like the tide - can't cage the champ, can't cage the courtroom, no sir. They tried to keep me off the air, stripped my title, took my license, but the truth found a channel anyway. Now any child with a phone can watch the law argue, and I say: let 'em see it, let 'em judge it, 'cause justice hidden is justice sold. I'm the greatest, and I'll stream from anywhere they'll have me.

Ha! The beautiful game taught me that everyone deserves a seat, even the boy with no shoes on the sand. So let the court come to the village, to the tenement, to the radio in the kitchen - the verdict should belong to all of us, not just the rich men in the front rows. But listen: a replay is not the match. You can watch the strike a hundred times and still miss the joy of that one instant when it happened.

Now that's the kind of question I like - can the whole family gather round and watch? When I first put a mouse on a moving celluloid, folks said nobody would sit for a cartoon with sound and colour; they sat, and they laughed, and they brought the children. Streaming is just the new projector, and if the courtroom can come into the parlour, then let it come with a good story and a decent ending - but mark my words, a courtroom is not a fairytale, and I'd not build a ride on it.