Dahlia Lithwick worked for two years in a family law firm in Reno, Nev. She is writing a novel about how divorce affects children.

Oh God.

I've figured it out.

This is all about religion, isn't it?

But first, the trial:

This morning, by prior agreement, the Justice and Microsoft lawyers read into the record excepts from the America Online documents with which Microsoft examined AOL's very hostile hostile witness, David Colburn, last week. (As an aside, no one ever reads the little sideways smiley-faces into the record. Why is that?) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Justice lawyers read principally those sentences that begin: "The Microsoft bastards are oppressing us beyond all endurance," while the Microsoft lawyers read the other sentences--the ones about "we shall rise up and band together with Netscape and Sun and break free from the tyrannical grip of the vile oppressor to someday [insert maniacal laughter here] conquer the wooooorld!"

We break at 11 for a long lunch. In the press room, I overhear a colleague bemoaning the flood of hearsay evidence admitted in this trial. (At some point this morning, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson asks John Warden of Microsoft, "Do we know when this document was created and by whom and in what context?" Warden replies with a long sentence that is Sullivan & Cromwell code for "no." Nevertheless, the document is on the record as something from sometime by someone at AOL. We think.) I laugh, recalling a time when I, too, was young and naive and shocked by the hearsay evidence in this case.

This afternoon is another leg of the desolate slog through the Siberian tundra of market shares and arcane definitions of predation (one of the DOJ claims in this trial). At some point, someone behind me passes up a note that says "Judge Jackson. We need a lead please. The press." Nothing is happening except that Microsoft's final rebuttal witness, Dean Richard Schmalensee of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, is making funny faces. Sullivan & Cromwell's Michael Lacovara will ask him how some of Microsoft's teeny weeny rivals are doing. Schmalensee will screw up his Basil Rathbone face into something approximating rapture as he enthuses about how well Linux is doing ("big investors") or about the future of the "open source movement" ("fascinating, fascinating"). He seems more concerned about calibrating the correct balance of euphoria and academic dispassion on his face, than he is with the substance of his answer.

And now on to God. It finally hit me today in the hard wooden pews of Judge Jackson's courtroom that this trial is a battle between church and state. Not just because we dress up in nice suits and make offers of proof to a man in black robes seated way up high on a dais. And not just because we swear on the Bible and not just because we are constantly standing up and sitting down and not because we intermittently go out into the hallway to gossip and misbehave. This trial is about religion and if you don't believe me, consider the language in the documents and testimony over the past few weeks: