"Your Honor" is an honorific, a term of address utilized as a symbolic acknowledgement of official status. In affairs of State, for example, "Your Excellency" is an accepted form of salutation for governors, presidents, secretaries of departments of government, etc. There is no law or protocol that requires a participant in a court hearing to use this term. It is a requirement established and enforced by the members of the judiciary. Their official office and title appear to be inadequate massages of the judicial ego. This appearance is reenforced by the panic which ensues in the courtroom if the judicial oficer is addressed as "Judge" or "Magistrate" or "Commissioner", instead of the dreary and improbable "Your Honor".

As with the eqully unimpressive black dress and high chair, the judiciary believes that these protocols imbue the person with some kind of magical wisdom, knowledge or moral superiority which will in turn, persuade any fool in the court that the person of the judge and his utterances are somehow supernatural, or at least, so swollen with the public power that the utterances must be considered god-like.

Judges are considered, and they too, consider themselves, "above the law". Challege the conduct of a judicial officer on his bench and see how fast you are wrestled to the floor by the several bailiffs, handcuffed, bruised and humiliated for your effort. This judicial conduct is, of course, against the law, but is traditionally tolerated as"within the discretion of the judge to maintain order in the court". Somehow, insisting that the judge obey the law is considered diorderly and contemptful conduct.

This reliance upon the muscle of the bailiff to impose the orders of the judge, regardless of how transparently illegal and abusive has resulted in a temper in judicual procedings very prejudicial to the common citizen's complaints and defenses.