Time & Perspective Quote by Stephen J. Field

A courtroom where judges need guns is not a courthouse anymore; it is a frontier outpost with better stationery. Stephen J. Field, a hard-edged 19th-century jurist who lived through the volatility of Gold Rush California and the roughening effects of American expansion, is drawing a bright line between law as authority and law as theater. His point isn’t simply about personal safety. It’s about legitimacy: once the robe requires a sidearm, the state has effectively admitted it cannot guarantee the very conditions that make adjudication meaningful.

Field’s phrasing is deliberately fatalistic. “Shall be obliged” frames armed judges as a systemic necessity, not a rare precaution. That matters, because a few threats can be handled by marshals; widespread obligation signals that coercion has migrated from the state’s perimeter into the institution’s center. “It will be time” reads like a grim procedural step, as if closing courts were an administrative consequence, not a moral panic. The coolness is the rhetoric: he’s warning that the rule of law dies not with a coup, but with a quiet normalization of fear.

The subtext is almost constitutional in spirit. Courts claim power by being the place where force is suspended and replaced by reason, precedent, and public procedure. If judges must carry weapons to command obedience, judgments become just another kind of armed order. Field is insisting that justice depends on a shared civic agreement to settle disputes without intimidation; when that agreement collapses, the honest move is to stop pretending the system is still law.