Our Courts as Our Last Human Place; The Local Rule of Law; and The Public Good of Artist-Placed Public Document Art

Adam Daley Wilson

January 2026

I. Core Theoretical Framework

Courts as Our Last Human Place: Courts are among the final public institutions where humans are structurally required to appear before other humans to be judged by other humans under conditions of reciprocal accountability, creating what can be described as our last human place in both institutional and epistemological senses.
The Central Claim: Only humans should judge other humans, not AI, because judgment requires answerability—the condition under which a human who exercises power must answer to other humans and accept consequences—and artificial intelligence systems cannot be answerable in the human sense because they lack moral standing, cannot be held responsible within moral communities, and cannot bear consequences that re-enter human social structures.
Seven Structural Conditions: Courts function as human institutions through seven interconnected conditions: (a) answerability—humans must justify decisions to other humans with consequences, (b) reciprocity—those who judge must be judgeable in return, (c) moral exposure—decision-makers must be vulnerable to critique and sanction, (d) interpretive presence—judgment requires human interpretation of meaning not algorithmic pattern recognition, (e) normative vulnerability—decisions must be subject to correction when wrong, (f) recognizability—people must be able to perceive who decided and how, and (g) human situatedness—judgment occurs through finite agents embedded in specific institutional contexts.
Why These Conditions Matter Together: Each condition is necessary but not sufficient; they operate causally such that answerability requires reciprocity, reciprocity requires moral exposure, moral exposure depends on recognizability, recognizability depends on interpretive presence, interpretive presence requires normative vulnerability, and all depend on human situatedness because judgment operates locally through finite humans in specific contexts.

II. The Local Rule of Law and Micro-Pocket Degradation

Local Rule of Law Definition: The rule of law exists and fails locally rather than uniformly because law is practiced by situated humans in specific courts and jurisdictions, meaning that the rule of law is the lived reality of legality as experienced within particular institutional cultures rather than merely abstract doctrine or appellate precedent.
Micro-Pocket Degradation: The rule of law degrades in local micro-pockets—specific courts, jurisdictions, or professional cultures—where attorney misconduct becomes tolerated or normalized, where accountability mechanisms exist formally but fail in practice, and where ethical norms shift incrementally through repeated failure to impose consequences for violations.
How Degradation Spreads: When attorneys engage in repeated misconduct without sanction in specific courts, other attorneys observe that ethical violations can occur without consequence, which weakens moral exposure and creates expectations that similar conduct will be tolerated, producing behavioral convergence toward lower ethical standards in those micro-pockets while other jurisdictions may maintain higher standards.
Why Degradation Is Non-Uniform: Legal systems are not monolithic but are composed of local institutions where specific humans make specific decisions under specific constraints, so when accountability mechanisms weaken in one location degradation occurs there while other locations may remain stable, creating uneven institutional landscape where rule of law functions differently across nominally unified legal systems.
Attorney Ethics as Constitutive: Attorney ethics are not supplementary to the rule of law but are constitutive of it because attorneys are officers of the court whose conduct affects institutional integrity, and when attorneys violate duties without facing sanctions the court becomes a place where power is exercised without answerability rather than remaining a site of reciprocal human accountability.

III. The Reality-Preserving Function of Courts

Courts as Reality-Stabilization Mechanisms: Courts function as institutions that create and preserve witnessed collective reality through proceedings that multiple humans observe, that are recorded in persistent form, and that produce determinations rendered by accountable human agents, creating what can be understood as procedural shared reality or institutional truth.
Witnessed Reality Distinguished from Abstract Truth: Courts do not discover pre-existing truth through neutral observation but create institutional reality through procedures in which multiple humans witness the same evidence and testimony and produce determinations that persist as institutional facts that participants and non-participants can reference when asking what happened, even when they disagree about interpretation or justice.
Why This Function Matters Now: In an era characterized by reality fragmentation, AI-generated content without human witnesses, algorithmically personalized information streams, and weakened accountability for false claims by public figures, courts remain as institutions that create shared observational events through which multiple humans witness the same proceedings and can verify with one another that specific events occurred.
The Sporting Event Parallel: Like sporting events where thousands witness the same physical occurrences simultaneously and can confirm with one another what happened even when disagreeing about calls or fairness, courts create observational convergence where participants agree on what testimony was given, what evidence was presented, and what determinations were made, creating shared baseline reality that persists regardless of whether participants accept outcomes.
Truth as What We Witnessed Together: What courts preserve is not truth as metaphysical correspondence but truth as collective human witness—reality that exists because humans created it together through witnessing, recording, and deciding, and that persists as institutional fact that can be verified through reference to what multiple humans observed rather than depending on individual claims that cannot be mutually confirmed.

IV. How AI Threatens Courts as Human Institutions

Why AI Cannot Judge: Artificial intelligence systems cannot judge humans in the normative sense because they cannot satisfy any of the seven structural conditions—they cannot be answerable (lack moral standing), cannot reciprocate judgment (cannot be judged), cannot be morally exposed (have no reputation to protect), cannot provide interpretive presence (process patterns not meanings), are not normatively vulnerable (are adjusted not corrected), are not recognizable as human agents, and are not situated in human professional cultures or moral communities.
AI as Administration Not Judgment: When courts delegate decision-making to AI systems, they transform from sites of human judgment to sites of administration by proxy, replacing witnessed human evaluation with algorithmic output generation that cannot be verified through questioning of accountable human decision-makers.
The Boundary Principle: The claim that only humans should judge other humans is structural not ideological because courts derive legitimacy from preserving conditions under which humans remain answerable to other humans for how power is exercised, and delegating judgment to non-answerable systems eliminates this legitimacy structure even if AI achieves technical accuracy.

V. Attorney-on-Attorney Misconduct Protection

The Configuration: The most severe form of institutional degradation occurs when an attorney representing a client who is themselves an attorney engages in misconduct to aid, abet, or conceal the client-attorney's underlying misconduct, creating compounded institutional harm because both attorneys simultaneously fail duties as officers of the court in ways that reinforce each other.
Why This Is Distinctively Harmful: Both attorneys understand their duties through legal training and professional experience, both exploit special courtroom privileges and presumption of truthfulness to introduce false information or obstruct investigations, both rely on self-regulation by other attorneys to avoid serious sanctions, and both demonstrate that attorney status creates opportunities for exploitation rather than ensuring ethical conduct.
Compounded Erosion of Moral Exposure: The configuration produces compounded erosion because the client-attorney evades accountability through representation that conceals misconduct while the representing attorney evades accountability by framing protective misconduct as zealous advocacy, and each attorney's conduct makes the other's accountability less likely because successful protection benefits both.
Demonstration Effects: The pattern creates powerful demonstration effects because it shows other attorneys that professional accountability mechanisms will not function when attorneys protect each other, which signals that ethical rules will not be enforced against attorneys who coordinate for mutual protection, creating incentives for similar coordination in future cases.
Conversion of Officer Status: Attorney-on-attorney protection converts officer of the court status from a designation creating heightened accountability into a liability shield that reduces accountability below what non-attorneys face, because attorneys exploit professional networks to obtain protection unavailable to non-attorneys accused of comparable misconduct.
Accelerated Micro-Pocket Degradation: The pattern produces accelerated local degradation because it concentrates in specific courts where attorneys practice regularly, creates demonstration effects that influence all attorneys in those courts, and produces behavioral convergence toward lower ethical standards as ethical attorneys withdraw or adopt similar tactics to remain competitive.
Professional Responsibility Violations: Both attorneys violate Model Rules including prohibitions on false statements to tribunals, obstruction of evidence, and conduct prejudicial to administration of justice, and both violate duties as officers of the court by prioritizing self-interest over institutional integrity.

VI. Attorney Monopoly and Special Status

The Monopoly Structure: Attorneys hold legally enforced monopoly on legal practice through unauthorized practice statutes, receive special courtroom access and privileges including presumption of truthfulness and ability to certify facts to tribunals, and maintain priest-like professional mystique that positions them as uniquely qualified to access and interpret law.
Justifications for Monopoly: The monopoly is justified through claims that attorneys possess special competence ensured through legal education and bar examination, that attorneys maintain ethical fitness through professional discipline, and that attorney intermediation serves court efficiency, but each justification is contradicted by evidence of substantial misconduct, inadequate discipline, and attorney conduct that increases rather than decreases court burdens.
How Misconduct Undermines Justifications: When attorneys exploit special status to engage in misconduct, the justification inverts because special status enables rather than prevents harm, and when attorneys coordinate to protect each other from accountability the claim of ethical superiority becomes hypocritical because it demonstrates that attorney status creates opportunities for unethical behavior rather than preventing it.
Monopoly Protection of Monopoly: Attorney monopoly operates in part to protect attorneys from accountability through self-regulation controlled by attorneys who may be reluctant to impose serious sanctions on other attorneys because of professional identification, concerns about reciprocal treatment, or recognition that harsh discipline would harm profession's reputation.
Public Right to Transparency: Because courts are public institutions exercising state power, the public holds rights to observe court proceedings and to access court records including documents showing attorney conduct, and these rights extend particularly to cases involving attorney misconduct because such misconduct harms institutional integrity and public confidence in courts.
Why Attorney Confidentiality Preferences Should Not Override: Attorney preferences for practical confidentiality serve primarily to protect attorneys from accountability rather than serving legitimate functions, and such preferences should not override public interests in transparency particularly when documents reveal attorney misconduct that discipline systems have failed to sanction.

VII. Artist-Placed Public Document Art

What It Is: Artist-placed public document art is a practice in which actual legal documents from court proceedings are placed into public spaces as the artwork itself—not representations, symbols, or illustrations, but actual legal documents including filings, rulings, transcripts, and disciplinary determinations.
How It Operates: The documents are placed deliberately in public locations where they can be encountered by people who were not parties to legal proceedings, transforming theoretical public access into actual visibility by eliminating barriers including courthouse travel requirements, filing fees, limited hours, and lack of indexing that make court records practically inaccessible despite nominal public status.
Answerability Performances: The practice creates answerability performances—occasions when legal processes that normally remain obscured become visible in ways that expose human decision-making to public scrutiny—by showing through actual documents that attorneys made specific choices, that those choices affected outcomes, and that identifiable humans are responsible for what occurred.
Extending Moral Exposure: The practice extends moral exposure beyond attorneys, judges, and parties who participated directly in proceedings to include members of the broader community who encounter documents in public space, creating reputational consequences that operate independently of formal disciplinary sanctions and that cannot be controlled through professional coordination.
Revealing Professional Coordination: When documents showing attorney-on-attorney protection are placed publicly, the coordination between attorneys becomes visible to community members who can read the actual filings and compare them to other evidence, making undeniable the pattern of how protective misconduct operates through specific statements, omissions, and tactical choices.
Supporting Local Rule of Law: The practice supports the local rule of law by creating targeted visibility in specific courts and jurisdictions where attorney-on-attorney protection has begun to degrade accountability, allowing community members to observe patterns of protective misconduct that formal oversight has failed to address and creating local awareness that enables community evaluation of whether legal systems function appropriately.
As Public Good: The practice provides public good by creating institutional transparency that allows community members to monitor whether professional accountability mechanisms function appropriately, by creating non-excludable and non-rivalrous visibility that benefits all community members regardless of legal sophistication or resources, and by generating collective benefits that exceed individual benefits through community-wide understanding of how institutions function.
Reinforcing Human Situatedness: By locating legal documents in specific physical places, the practice reinforces that law operates locally and is experienced by situated humans rather than existing as abstract doctrine, and by making documents visible as physical objects the practice emphasizes that law is created through human action at particular moments rather than occurring automatically.
As Preventive Mechanism: The practice operates preventively by demonstrating to attorneys who might consider protective misconduct that such conduct creates risks beyond formal discipline because it may be made publicly visible through document placement that creates lasting reputational consequences, strengthening deterrence beyond what formal discipline alone achieves.
Reinforcing Courts as Last Human Place: The practice reinforces courts as our last human place by making visible that legal proceedings involve identifiable humans making decisions for which they can be held accountable by other humans, counteracting pressures that threaten to transform courts from sites of witnessed human judgment into procedural systems that generate outputs without clear human responsibility.

VIII. The Universal Human Foundations

Witness as Fundamental Need: The most fundamental human need across all philosophical traditions is to be seen, acknowledged, and evaluated by other humans—Ubuntu's "I am because we are," Confucian ritual recognition, Western phenomenology of the Other, Buddhist sangha—all recognize that humans exist through mutual recognition, and courts function as institutions where this witnessing occurs under conditions of ultimate seriousness.
Mortality Creates Responsibility: Humans die and AI does not, which creates the entire architecture of responsibility because only mortals stake their singular finite existence on decisions and therefore only mortals can bear responsibility in ways that create moral weight, and when courts delegate judgment to systems that are not mortal they eliminate the mortality that makes judgment serious rather than merely computational.
Sacred Spaces of Judgment: All cultures create designated spaces where humans evaluate other humans under conditions of heightened formality and seriousness—temples, councils, courts, shrines—and these function as sacred-secular spaces not through supernatural belief but through ritual structures that mark evaluation as ultimately serious, and courts remain as such spaces where humans confront humans with lasting consequences.
Truth as Collective Witnessing: Truth in institutional contexts is not abstract correspondence but is what communities witnessed together and can verify through mutual reference to shared observation, which explains why courts function as reality-creating institutions that produce determinations with institutional status not because they are metaphysically correct but because they emerged from witnessed procedures that multiple humans can reference and confirm.
Persons Versus Systems: All philosophical traditions distinguish persons who can be addressed and who respond with responsibility from mechanisms that operate without moral standing, and this distinction is categorical not technical because persons participate in moral relationships while systems do not, which explains why AI cannot replace human judges regardless of technical sophistication because replacement would transform courts from institutions of mutual recognition into processing systems.
Shame and Face: All humans live in webs of reputation that create behavioral restraint through desire to maintain positive standing and through fear of losing face, which explains why moral exposure functions as accountability mechanism because attorneys operate in professional communities where reputation affects opportunities, and why extending visibility through public document placement creates consequences even when formal discipline fails.
Artifacts as Memory: Humans create physical objects to preserve what happened and to transmit knowledge across time to people who were not present, which explains why legal documents function as memory objects that document how law was applied by specific humans at specific times, and why physical placement in public space matters because it creates memory in durable form that resists manipulation and remains observable through embodied encounter.
Reciprocity as Cosmic Principle: All traditions recognize reciprocity as fundamental—karma, yin-yang, Golden Rule, Ubuntu, social contract—expressing the principle that those who exercise power must be subject to power in return, which explains why courts must maintain structures where those who judge are subject to judgment including appellate review and professional discipline, and why AI fails because it cannot be judged in return.
Corruption of the Guide: All traditions treat corrupt priests, false teachers, and dishonest judges as among the worst violators because they corrupt the very structures that maintain social order, which explains why attorney-on-attorney misconduct protection is particularly severe because it involves those entrusted with maintaining accountability using their positions to prevent accountability from functioning.
Art as Revelation: Art across all cultures functions to make visible what is present but unseen, to force attention to what has been ignored, and to create recognition of what has been hidden, which explains why artist-placed public document art operates as art rather than merely as information distribution because it uses aesthetic strategies to create encounter with legal documents that forces recognition of attorney conduct and court functioning that would otherwise remain invisible.

IX. Integration and Implications

How Everything Connects: Courts function as our last human place through seven structural conditions that create witnessed institutional reality, but these conditions degrade in local micro-pockets when attorney misconduct goes unsanctioned particularly through attorney-on-attorney protection, and artist-placed public document art serves as countermeasure by extending moral exposure and creating answerability performances that reinforce accountability when self-regulation fails, all grounded in universal human needs for witness, reciprocity, and collective truth-creation.
The Stakes: What is at stake is not merely procedural justice or fairness to individual parties but the preservation of institutional mechanisms through which humans create and maintain shared reality in an age when reality itself has become contested and fragmented, because when courts lose capacity to create witnessed institutional reality through accountable human judgment, society loses access to institutions that can produce determinations that multiple humans can reference as baseline facts even when interpretation remains contested.
Why This Matters for AI Age: As artificial intelligence systems increasingly participate in institutional life and as pressure intensifies to delegate decision-making to systems that cannot be answerable, courts remain as institutions that preserve witnessed human judgment under conditions of reciprocal accountability, but this preservation requires maintaining the seven structural conditions and preventing their degradation through attorney misconduct and through incorporation of non-answerable systems into judgment roles.
The Attorney Monopoly Problem: Attorney monopoly on court access rests on justifications that are contradicted by substantial misconduct and inadequate discipline, and when attorneys exploit monopoly to prevent accountability the case for maintaining monopoly collapses, suggesting need for reforms including elimination of access barriers, strengthening of alternative accountability through transparency, and reconsideration of whether monopoly should be replaced by conditional privilege depending on demonstrated ethical fitness.
Public Accountability as Corrective: When professional self-regulation fails to maintain minimum standards, public accountability through transparency and through practices including artist-placed public document art serves as necessary corrective by allowing community monitoring of attorney conduct and by creating alternative accountability mechanisms through reputational consequences and market choice that function independently of whether formal discipline occurs.
The Relationship Between the Three Core Elements: Courts as our last human place depends on preserving seven structural conditions, the local rule of law degrades in micro-pockets when those conditions weaken through unsanctioned misconduct, and artist-placed public document art reinforces the conditions by extending witness and moral exposure beyond professional insiders to include broader communities who can observe attorney conduct and evaluate whether accountability mechanisms function, creating integrated framework in which institutional preservation depends on maintaining human judgment, preventing local degradation, and ensuring public visibility.
Historical and Cross-Cultural Validation: The framework is validated by historical parallels including the Athenian agora preserving face-to-face deliberation when written law abstracted principles, medieval guild courts maintaining peer accountability when royal bureaucracies expanded, and jury systems preserving non-expert judgment when legal expertise risked making law inaccessible, and by cross-cultural recognition that institutions require witness, reciprocity, mortality-based responsibility, and sacred spaces of evaluation.
Other Last Human Places: Beyond courts, other institutions may function as last human places including sporting events where embodied spectators witness unmediated human performance, live theater requiring physical co-presence, academic oral examinations preserving face-to-face evaluation, medical bedside examination retaining interpretive presence, and physical voting preserving embodied participation, each sharing structural features that humans appear before other humans and that evaluation occurs through direct encounter under conditions that resist automation.
The Choice Ahead: Contemporary institutions face choice between preserving foundational human conditions through reform that strengthens accountability or abandoning them through automation and through tolerance of professional misconduct, and the stakes involve not merely efficiency or technical improvement but preservation of institutional structures through which humans create shared realities, maintain collective order, and recognize each other as persons deserving hearing and evaluation by other persons.
Why This Framework Matters: The framework synthesizes legal ethics, institutional theory, epistemology, AI governance, and art practice into coherent account of how courts function as reality-preserving institutions, why they degrade locally, how misconduct accelerates degradation particularly through attorney-on-attorney protection, and how certain practices reinforce institutional conditions without replacing legal mechanisms, providing both descriptive analysis of how institutions work and normative framework for evaluating reforms that would strengthen or weaken conditions necessary for courts to remain human institutions rather than becoming procedural systems that lack capacity to create witnessed institutional reality that humans can collectively reference and trust.

Selected referenes / endnotes (research continues):

Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964). (Yale University Press)
Jeremy Waldron, The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
Judith Resnik, “Managerial Judges,” Harvard Law Review 96, no. 2 (December 1982): 374–448. (RAND Corporation)
David Luban, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). (Internet Archive)
Deborah L. Rhode, Access to Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). (global.oup.com)
Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). (Amazon)
Julie E. Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). (global.oup.com)
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 25, 1967. (The New Yorker)
American Bar Association, Model Rules of Professional Conduct, 2025 Edition (Chicago: American Bar Association Publishing, 2025). (American Bar Association)
American Bar Association, “Model Rules of Professional Conduct: About the Model Rules” (adopted 1983; page accessed 2026). (American Bar Association)
American Law Institute, Restatement of the Law Third, The Law Governing Lawyers (St. Paul, MN: American Law Institute Publishers, 2000). (The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.)
American Bar Association, Standards for Imposing Lawyer Sanctions (adopted February 1986; amended through February 1992). (Lawcat)
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934). (ia902908.us.archive.org)
Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995). (Internet Archive)
Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). (Free Library Catalog)
Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997). (Internet Archive)
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998; English trans. 2002). (Les Presses du Réel)
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). (3) perihal KOMUNIKASI PEMASARAN)
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). (JSS Academy of Technical Education)
Confucius, Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003). (Hackett Publishing)
The Dhammapada: A New Translation of the Buddhist Classic with Annotations, trans. Gil Fronsdal (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2005; updated ed. 2018). (Shambhala Pubs)
Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, trans. and comm. Jay L. Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). (global.oup.com)
The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1985). (AbeBooks)