by Syed Ahfadul Mujtaba
Live-streamed courtrooms transform legal proceedings into shared public experiences, where memory, perception, and rhetoric shape justice beyond formal records and influence democratic trust
“The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance.
This is where authors, actors, and directors express everything they have to say.
If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those
who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.”
— Peter Brook, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare
It started, for me, not in a book, but on a screen.
One afternoon, I found myself watching a live-streamed court hearing (something that would not have been possible not so long ago), and I noticed I was paying attention not just to what was being argued, but to how it was being argued. The courtroom had its usual gravity. Everything was measured, restrained, and properly legal. But there was something else in the air, something quiet and easy to miss if you were not looking for it.
The awareness of being watched.
Not by the handful of people in the gallery, but by thousands of others scattered across living rooms, offices, and phone screens, all following the same proceedings in real time. It did not make things feel less serious; if anything, it seemed to add weight. But it also planted a question I kept coming back to: what happens to a legal event when it picks up an audience of that size? Does it stay the same thing it was, or does it quietly become something else?
Peter Brook’s words, written about theatre, have stayed with me as I have tried to work through this. A play, he says, lives and dies in the moment of its performance. Whatever future it has exists not in recordings or transcripts, but in the memories of those who were there, in the impression it left on them. That is a thought about theatre, but I think it is also a thought about any public event conducted before a real, living audience. And it puts a sharp point on something the age of the live-streamed courtroom has made newly urgent: when those who are present number in the thousands, when the audience is not a gallery but a nation, what trace does the event leave, and who carries it?
Sitting with that question, I kept finding myself pulled toward ancient Greece. The great theatrical festivals in Athens were not a break from civic life; they were civic life. Plays were performed in vast open-air theatres before entire communities, and what they explored (guilt and innocence, the cost of justice, the claims of the living and the dead) was not treated as specialist territory. These were the shared concerns of the city, examined in public, together.
What Greek tragedy understood, with a sophistication we have never quite surpassed, is exactly what Brook is getting at. The performance was the thing. Not the text on its own, not the myth on its own, but the living event: the encounter between the work and its audience, in a particular time and place that could not be replayed. When Sophocles staged Oedipus before the citizens of Athens, he was not presenting facts. He was presenting an experience. The audience left not with information but with feeling, the weight of what they had witnessed, the pity and fear that Aristotle would later identify as tragedy’s particular gift. What they took home was not a record. It was a trace.
This is why Aristotle thought drama was more philosophical than history. History records the particular: what happened, to whom, when. Drama reaches for something else, for what is true not of one man in one moment, but of human experience itself. Tragedy’s power was never in its accuracy. It was in its impact, in the way it settled into memory, shifted feeling, and kept living in the people who had been there long after the performance ended. The event’s future, as Brook says, lay in the hearts of those who had witnessed it.
It is worth pausing on the scale of this. The Theatre of Dionysus held around fourteen thousand people. A single tragedy was, by ancient standards, something of extraordinary reach: a shared experience that moved through thousands of minds at once, leaving in each of them something that could not quite be put into words. The event was communal; its residue was intimate. Everyone carried their own version of it, shaped by what they had brought and what they had found. And the accumulation of those individual traces, held in thousands of individual hearts, was what the play’s life looked like once the performance was over.
Rome offers a different example, and in some ways a more instructive one, because it brought this understanding directly into the legal arena. Cicero, working in a world where court outcomes were never entirely separate from the political mood around them, grasped something the Greek tragedians had approached from a different angle. What endures from a legal proceeding is not just the verdict, or even the argument that produced it, but the impression the whole thing leaves in the minds of those who watched it.
Cicero understood, with the instincts of a great advocate and the discipline of a trained philosopher, that a courtroom is not a place where truth presents itself and waits to be recognised. It is a place where truth has to be performed, not invented, but given shape, brought into the light in a way that guides the listener through feeling what is at stake rather than just being told about it. Facts alone do not carry a case. They need to be arranged, animated, and made into an experience. His great speeches are, among other things, exercises in the management of memory: he wanted his listeners to leave the Forum carrying something, not just the outcome but the emotional weight of what they had heard.
That was not manipulation in any simple sense. It was a recognition, one that Brook articulates across two millennia, that the life of a public event is inseparable from the experience of those present. A legal proceeding that leaves no trace in its audience’s hearts has failed at something beyond the merely legal. It has failed to make justice felt, which is to say it has failed to make justice real in the only register where, ultimately, it matters: the human one.
Cicero also understood the danger. Rhetoric aimed at the heart without discipline of mind could do real damage. The Roman Republic’s final decades were partly a casualty of oratory cut loose from principle, of impact pursued for its own sake and detached from the truth it was supposed to serve. Cicero was not innocent of this himself. He knew how to move an audience beyond what the evidence alone justified, and he did it when he thought it necessary. The tension between impact and accuracy, between what is felt and what is true, was as live in the Roman Forum as it is in any modern courtroom playing to a camera.
The modern courtroom sits at an interesting distance from both these older worlds, and yet it has inherited something essential from each. From Greek tragedy, it inherits the condition of being witnessed: the sense of a community gathered, across physical and now digital space, to watch proceedings that concern them in ways they might not be able to fully articulate. From Cicero, it inherits the knowledge that speech in a legal setting is never purely informational. Words here have consequences that reach into lives and livelihoods, and how they are delivered is not incidental to what they do.
What technology has changed is scale. Where once a handful of observers sat in a gallery, now thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, can follow the same hearing in real time, watching the same faces, registering the same silences, and forming their own sense of what justice looks like when it is being done or denied. In a real sense, the courtroom has become an event in Brook’s full meaning of the word: something that begins and ends in the moment of its unfolding, whose future lies not in the official record but in the accumulated memory of an audience too large and too varied to be anticipated.
That is a significant shift, and it is worth sitting with rather than rushing past. The official record (the transcript, the judgment, the documented reasoning) has always been the formal repository of what happened. But it has never been the only one. People who attended trials always carried their own versions home: impressions, feelings, doubts, convictions. What live coverage does is extend that human record to a vastly greater number of people, each of whom will carry their own trace, shaped by what they saw and heard and felt. The proceeding does not end when the session closes. It keeps going, in memory, in conversation, in the texture of public feeling about whether justice was actually done.
Those who appear in court before a live audience are, whether they fully acknowledge it or not, in a position closer to Cicero addressing the Forum than to the advocate of recent tradition speaking to a small gallery of specialists. Their words are weighed not only for legal precision but for how they will land on someone with no legal training, someone for whom the proceeding is not a technical exercise but a human drama, watched with the instincts we bring to any situation that touches on justice and its costs. They are implicitly being asked to create an event whose future will live in the hearts of those who watched it.
That is not performance in any hollow or artificial sense. It might be better understood as a heightened responsibility of articulation, the same responsibility the Greek tragedians took on when they staged their great examinations of justice before a whole city, and that Cicero took on when he rose to speak in the Forum, knowing what he said would outlast the moment in the memories of all who heard him. The structure of legal proceedings is robust enough to resist pure theatricality. But a mass audience does change what is required of those who speak, not toward performance, but toward clarity, accountability, and the care to hold impact and truth together.
The question this raises is not whether the live-streamed courtroom is a good or bad development. It is both, depending on what is done with it. The Greeks knew that the public performance of justice could ennoble a community or inflame it; they built their festivals with that in mind, surrounding them with ritual and civic purpose. Cicero knew oratory could illuminate truth or obscure it; he deployed it brilliantly, and history eventually had its say about both the man and the method. The courtroom that plays to a camera inherits both possibilities at once.
What Brook’s words remind us is that the stakes are real, and they are human before they are institutional. A proceeding witnessed by thousands does not just create a legal record. It creates an experience, one that will be remembered, discussed, and felt long after the transcript is filed. The trace it leaves in thousands of hearts is not incidental to the proceeding. In a democracy, where the legitimacy of legal institutions rests ultimately on public trust, that trace is part of what justice is.
From the amphitheatres of Athens to the law courts of Rome, and now to the digitally visible proceedings of our own time, one thread runs quietly through the history of speech in public life. What endures is not the argument alone, but the impression it makes on those who hear it. The event’s future lies in the memories of those present. The courtroom has always known this, in its way. What has changed is only the number of people who are, in some meaningful sense, present, and in whose hearts the trace, for better or worse, will remain.
The essential task stays the same: to make sure that speech in the courtroom keeps serving justice, not merely as expression, but as a disciplined, responsible, deeply considered act. The audience has grown. The obligation that comes with speaking in that room, the obligation to make an event worthy of the memory it will leave, has grown with it.
(The author, after retiring as IGP in Jammu and Kashmir Police, was a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission. Ideas are personal.)
