@Simon_Jester
One of your preferred writers, Bret Devereaux, recently did a
series on the decline of Rome, and a standalone post on
holding court. Both are relevant to central arguments of this thread and, if you've read them, I would like to know if they contain anything in particular that you would emphasize here.
I'd want to do a reread of the 'Fall of Rome' series and I don't have the brain juice for it tonight, but regarding the 'holding court' thing... That's really more about the other Chorned thread, but then, the Chorned threads have all been an indistinguishable pulpy mass for a long time, so shrug.
In regards to holding court, suffice to say that
yes, the practice of kingship in the kind of society Dr. Devereaux talks about does involve regularly inviting lots of nobles and maybe even peasants to "royal court" to do things like settle disputes.
The trick is that this model of kingship doesn't scale to galactic empires very well. Even in our own real-life modern societies, which are
only about 10-100 times as populous as a medium-to-large medieval kingdom, heads of state generally do not "hold court" like a medieval king. Even modern autocrats usually outsource the "chief judge" role to some other person or group of people, though of course they tend to reserve the right to override or control the judges' actions if they think it necessary to do so for reasons of statecraft.
The reason for this is quite simple. Modern societies tend to be more complex, with more elaborate financial and legal structures in place. While ancient/medieval/early-modern law codes COULD be complicated, they were usually complicated because of a maze of special exceptions and privileges... which were often exactly the kind of patchwork that a king making 'court' decisions would tend to make on the spot to deal with immediate problems and create future problems for the grandkids trying to sort out who owns which side of the river or whatever. Trying to keep track of the entire legal code well enough to be a good final judge is an entire complex specialization in its own right, and most modern forms of autocracy do not center this responsibility in the person of the autocrat.
This is one of many ways in which it's just plain silly to imagine futuristic galactic polities that stretch across much of the galaxy as having legal systems and government structures that are basically "early modern France but IIIINN SPAAACE!" or something. A lot of institutions like those old ones collapse when they try to coordinate a half a million people across a small fraction of one continent, let alone anything bigger across interstellar distances.
