Re:Brazilian Court Sanctions Lawyers for Prompt Injection in...
by wat10000 on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:18AM
(#50339074)
The theater lets you get by with a lot fewer armed men backing it up, and with a lot less usage of them. Even authoritarian countries with preordained verdicts engage in this theater. Why? It's not because they're worried about being extremely precise with their language or because they're really into centuries-old fashion. It's because the whole thing helps to convey a sense of authority into both the involved parties and the populace at large, and that makes it easier to control them.
The fact that the language is "flowery" is an attempt to convey strict semantics using human language. The Latin tenor of legal language in Anglophone countries is a historical quirk. The wigs are because the legal profession is inherently backward-looking and there was a time when such wigs were normal. The theatricality of all this is incidental; a court's authority depends on none of it; it's the men with batons and guns.