The second theme is the concept I have elsewhere styled "the phantoms of the courtroom"
+(2). This term means that the actual attorneys and judges are treated by the legal system as though they were invisible. That is, when a ruling comes down in the case of
Smith v. Jones, the language is, "The court found that Jones failed to plead the proper argument" when what is meant is that a specific person, Judge Leonard Adversarian, decided that Mel Feasance, Jones’s lawyer, failed to do the proper thing. Jones himself would likely not know a proper argument if it bit him. But the judge and the attorney are concealed by "the court" and the named client.