Negotiating disputes and achieving judgments on 'Judge Judy'

This discourse-analytic study of interactions on a televised court show describes how small claims disputes are negotiated and resolved. It finds that the presiding judge Judith Sheindlin on Judge Judy, re-constructs opposing stories from plaintiff and defendant into a new story from which an agreeable-to decision follows. Televised small claims courts have received very little attention despite their potential influence on viewers' perceptions of the justice system. In a survey by The National Center for State Courts (1999), 40.5 percent of respondents indicated that they rely 'sometimes' or 'regularly' on televised small claims courts for information about the U.S. legal system. This suggests that court shows not only entertain, but also play an important role in molding lay views of institutionalized dispute resolution. While dispute resolution has been examined from different perspectives, we know little about how participants negotiate what their dispute is about and how decisions are achieved. This study examines the interactional resources and discursive practices of Sheindlin and the litigants who have agreed to be bound by her decision. The first part examines the interactional resources, analyzing how the judge directs and transforms litigants' stories and negotiates mutual understanding of what a case is about. The second part addresses discursive practices, analyzing the interactions in their socio-cognitive context in an effort to make explicit certain assumptions in the discourse of participants about 'how the world works,' and it analyzes the interactions in an effort to lay out participants' 'common sense' reasoning and the potential seductiveness of the judge's invocation of 'common sense' in achieving decisions. The analysis shows that Sheindlin determines the scope of a case by narrowing and by establishing or elaborating elements of litigants' stories, the details of which may be further transformed through formulations and decisions. Further, the study finds that Sheindlin's invocations of 'common sense' allow her to reduce complex disputes to manageable moral story lines with characters whose various actions are clearly 'right' or 'wrong,' making for palatable judgments. Applications of the analysis and findings to other real world situations are also explored.