In a previous column, we looked at how courthouses transmit meaning through their forms. Now, I want to move inside and show how courtrooms do the same.

If a courthouse announces itself in a certain public way, its interior does so much more privately. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggests that this is so because "a court, unlike any other government agency, concerns itself not with the public en masse, but with the individual citizen who appears before it. It devotes as much time and attention to the particular individual's specific problem as the problem requires."