In a house at 84A Nguyen Du Street, near the heart of old Saigon, well back from the modern office buildings springing up on all sides, Nguyen Phuoc Dai holds court.
Actually, she has never been a judge in the courtroom sense. In fact, since the communists took over in 1975, she hasn't even been able to work as a lawyer. Number 84A is listed as La Bibliotheque de Madame Dai, and it isn't a library either - it's a restaurant.
But it was a library once, a law library, back when Madame Dai was a leading South Vietnamese politician and barrister. And then, as now, she was a sharp-witted, tough, independent judge of all she surveyed.
Vigorous and elegant at 72, her hair dyed to its original jet black, Vietnam's first woman lawyer welcomed recent visitors with 'bon soir' and a promise of Bordeaux and local delicacies. On her, she insists.
'I bless God for giving me this good idea [of opening a restaurant] when I closed my law practice,' she said. 'For me it is a big door still open. It is a salon, a meeting place for intellectuals. You bring me fresh air, and I need the oxygen more than I need money.' French is the language of Madame Dai's considerable education, but she shifts so fluidly to Vietnamese, English and Japanese as she moves from guest to guest that she seems as unconscious of the changes as she is of having aged from the Hepburn-style sophisticate she looks like in the photo taken when she returned to Vietnam from France in 1952.
Madame Dai felt no need to run when South Vietnam finally collapsed. She had served in various South Vietnamese governments since the early 1960s, but she also had opposed the leadership at key junctures, and she represented Vietcong defendants in South Vietnamese courts.
'I didn't worry, because my hands were clean,' she said. 'But after 1975 I could not continue as a lawyer. I was trained abroad. By my experience, lawyers should do everything possible to defend the client. But then I felt lawyers here were supposed to be careful of what they said. I could not accept that.' By that time, all of Madame Dai's family had gone from Vietnam - her parents to France, daughter to Canada, son to the US. Many friends were fleeing, and her husband, a surgeon and director of Saigon Hospital, asked what to do.