Justice is supposed to be blind, but it turns out it’s also pretty bad at stairs.

Last week, a 95-year-old man—let’s call him the Ghost of Litigation Past—couldn't make it to the dock. He’s bedridden. He’s fragile. He’s lived through two world wars, the invention of the transistor, and presumably three different versions of the local zoning laws he’s been fighting since the Reagan administration. So, the court packed its bags. The judge, the clerk, and a small army of lawyers all piled into a mid-sized sedan and drove to his bedside to deliver a verdict.

The headlines call it "compassionate." I call it a glitch in the simulation.

We live in an era where we can beam 4K video from the surface of Mars, yet our legal system still operates on the assumption that if you aren't physically standing on a specific piece of polished marble, the law doesn't officially happen. It’s 2026. We were promised "e-courts" and digital equity. Instead, we got a judge sitting on a folding chair next to a commode.

Don't get me wrong. It’s a nice gesture for the old man. But the "mercy" here is really just a workaround for a systemic failure. The case in question—a property dispute that’s been rotting in the system for three decades—cost the state an estimated $14,000 in administrative overhead just for this one afternoon of mobile justice. That doesn't include the decades of legal fees that likely bled the man’s inheritance dry before he even got to hear the final word.

It’s the ultimate tech-debt. We built a society on legacy code. The law is a series of "if/then" statements written on parchment, and when the hardware—the human body—starts to fail, the software crashes.

Why did it take 30 years to reach this point? Because the system isn't designed for speed; it’s designed for protocol. We’ve spent billions on "digital infrastructure" projects that usually end up as buggy portals with 2004-era UI. You know the ones. They require a specific version of a browser that hasn't been supported since the Obama administration. When those fail, we revert to the physical. We force a centenarian to prove he’s still alive by staring him in the face because we don't trust the cloud, a secure link, or a simple video call.

There’s a specific kind of irony in seeing a judge in full robes standing in a cramped suburban living room. It’s theater. It’s the performance of authority in a space that doesn't accommodate it. The lawyers probably had to move a stack of old magazines just to find a place for their briefcases. The court reporter likely struggled with a spotty Wi-Fi connection to sync the transcript to a server three counties away.

We’re told this is progress. We’re told this is the system "meeting the people where they are." But if the system actually cared about the people, it wouldn't have waited until the man was a month away from his own obituary to decide who owns a strip of dirt behind a warehouse.

The court delivered the verdict. The old man listened. Maybe he understood it, maybe he didn't. Either way, the state checked a box. They can say the case is closed. They can pretend the wheels of justice are still turning, even if they need a jump-start and a gallon of high-octane PR to get down the driveway.

The real question isn't why the court went to him. It’s why we still think a physical presence is the only thing that makes a judgment "real" while the rest of our lives happen in the ether. We’ve automated our banking, our dating, and our grocery shopping, but we still require a 95-year-old to play host to a legal circus just to get a signature.

If this is the future of the "mobile judiciary," I hope you’ve kept your guest room clean. You never know when the law might decide to crash on your couch for a couple of hours to tell you everything you lost forty years ago.

How much did we pay for the gas to get the judge there, and did anyone remember to validate the parking?