By ‘courts’, people generally understand the material buildings that house the organisations where the business of justice is carried out, but also the systems set up to resolve controversies according to law.

This short feature will touch on both.

The Magistrates’ Court was housed in Casa Tessi, in Old Bakery Street, Valletta, until 1964.

The Castellania, in Merchants Street, built in 1760, housed the ordinary law courts during the Knights’ and the earlier British period.

Since early modern times, the mother of all courthouses in Malta has been the Castellania, in Merchants Street, Valletta, where the ordinary civil and criminal courts had been since 1760. The Order of St John administered its own internal justice for knights at the Grand Master’s Palace or in St John’s Oratory of the Decollation.

The Vice-Admiralty court in session at the Palace, early in the 19th century. Watercolour by Brockdorff. Private collection

Grand Master Pinto wanted baroque sculpture to embellish his Castellania. The Neapolitan scalpellino Giovanni Puglisi, responsible for those refined stone decorations, sadly ended up being the first person to be tried and condemned to death for homicide, in the courthouse he had just ornamented.

An early post-war card of the Court of Appeal

With the abolition of the death penalty in 2000, the courts stopped being the centre of morbid frisson they had traditionally been for ages.

The building of the new law courts in the 1960s.

Today’s high-profile political cases are only a pale substitute for the ominous popular curiosity capital trials previously provoked.

Card of the Gozo courts. Artwork by the painter Gio Battista Conti

Images, both graphic and photos, of courts in session or of interior spaces, prove to be extremely scarce, partly because of the judiciary’s traditional reticence to be photo­graphed.

A rather strange reticence, considering that the maximum publicity of court proceedings is mandated as a fundamental human right, both the interest of the parties and of a fair administration of justice.

The 1961 farewell ceremony in honour of Judge Alberto Magri Sr, surrounded by all the judges in office.

In Malta, the ‘judiciary’ comprises all the professional judges and magistrates. But the usefulness of that levelling collective noun ends there.

The Magistrates’ court in session in 1846

Every judge and magistrate is firstly a human being, brilliant or stupid, fearless or craven, with ingrained integrity or a stalwart soldier of steel, hardly ever stainless.

The judiciary attending the state funeral of prime minister Enrico Mizzi in 1950, the judges following the magistrates.

Chief Justice Sir George Borg receiving the George Cross on behalf of the people of Malta in 1942.

Most images are from the author’s collections.

Sir Arturo Mercieca, an iconic Chief Justice of the Maltese courts.

Constantine John Colombos, QC, a Maltese lawyer and a world authority on maritime law