Maybe more people would trust this country's legal system if Supreme Court justices felt free to say things like, "Look at me sir, do I have `stupid' written across my forehead?"
People who haven't been near a television at noon for the last few years may not recognize that quote, but Judge Judith Scheindlin's candid and brazen words are becoming familiar to a growing audience of viewers.
Over the past few years, daytime television has undergone a major transformation. No matter how many angry, transsexual, racist, pregnant, teenage strippers they parade across their stages, talk show hosts like Jerry Springer have lost their audiences to a fleet of "Reality Courtroom" shows.
Midday channel-surfers now can choose between "Judge Judy," "Judge Joe Brown," "Judge Mills Lane," and now, "Divorce Court." This new breed of low-budget dramas follows a simple formula: two people have agreed to dismiss their real small claims lawsuits, and instead plead their cases before an impatient and presumptuous judge. (If you haven't seen the Emmy-nominated "Judge Judy," it's probably best to imagine Judge Wapner from "The People's Court," only with red hair and on speed.)
It would be easy to explain this genre's amazing popularity by citing the inherent tension and drama of watching "real people" with "real cases." But despite their claims of authenticity, all of these shows seem to conveniently skip a few details of actual American courtrooms - like lawyers, paperwork and appeals, just to name a few.
Television courtrooms hardly offer a complete picture of the way justice really works in this country. In fact, their mass appeal may be because of the ways in which they are unlike real courts. These programs offer viewers a utopian legal system where the American Dream of justice for all has been realized.
In television trials, everyone in America can bring his or her grievances directly to the courtroom regardless of race, ethnic heritage or social status. The decisions don't turn on which client can pay his law firm more money. The issues don't involve impersonal and vague, monolithic corporate entities. Dependable and trustworthy people preside over all the cases and since an appeal process wouldn't fit into a trial that only lasts two commercial breaks, rulings are never overturned.
Best of all, the producers of these shows have eliminated all the lawyers. The moment tele-litigants begin speaking in legalese, they are scolded for trying to "pull a fast one." What's more, Judge Joe Brown and company rarely complicate matters with the petty nuances of case law, meaningless and obscure statutes, or the regard to precedence that clutters real judgments.
The rulings are all grounded in common sense and old-fashioned American values. (Judge Judy often prefaces her decisions with comments like, "Don't try fooling me - they don't pay me here because I'm gorgeous, they pay me here because I can tell these things.")
It's how the United States is supposed to work. In "The People's Court," the hard-working and decent always triumph over the lazy and crude. Every television trial is like a miniature morality play, reinforcing the message that the legal system can be trusted to work fairly and help instill American ethics. Who wouldn't want to see a place where all people, rich and poor, white and black, are treated as equals? Who wouldn't want to believe that the system isn't stacked against the impoverished, or that wealth and politics don't mean anything to the law?
Just think of how much better the world would be if we had people like Judge Wapner in every court. If Judge Judy sat on the bench for the Kory v. Smith, Kintz and Tigrett case, this whole thing would have been finished much sooner.
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