More often, the lawyer finds an interior design favored by dictators, as exemplified by Mussolini, whose office was arranged so that a visitor walked across a cavernous, formal room and shrank like Alice in Wonderland, while approaching a huge desk on a riser with a stout, powerful person behind it and two hard-back chairs in front for squirming supplicants. In chambers, judges become more like people—formal or informal, autocratic or friendly, morose or cheerful, Type A or Type B—with one important difference: No matter what their personality, they retain the same almost superhuman power over careers and clients. In chambers, the lawyers may feel they are having an after-dinner conversation with the judge about their case, or they may sustain the intense scrutiny one receives when applying for a salaried position or a large, unsecured loan. Most lawyers endure these tolerably stressful sessions, never wondering about the resonance of the expression “judge’s chambers.” Visitors to Federal District Judge Whittaker J.
