| In my dissertation, The Television Ate the Courtroom: The Pedagogy and Performativity of Judge TV, I examine judge TV, a television genre established by The People's Court in 1981 - the same year the Supreme Court's decision in Chandler v. Florida re-situated the Court's relationship to the media from one of contention to one of invitation. By 1981, the Court's sentiment echoed Chief Justice Berger's belief that cameras should be welcome in courtrooms in order to satisfy a public need to witness justice at work (Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia [1980]). I consider judge TV as a performance site where primarily black, Hispanic, and female judges produce competing images of justice. Judge TV judges perform didactically, basing their decisions on local logics and personal opinions as they arbitrate cases and perform them as small claims trials. Instead of deferring to the formalism of legal sublimation, judge TV judges resist a system of practice that puts their voices, subjective opinions, and ideas of fairness second to any institutionalized belief system.;I analyze judge TV from multiple angles. As a viewer I consider judge TV programs as teaching plays and interrogate their pedagogical resonances. I examine the performance strategies each judge uses to best deliver his/her lesson, and I study how these performances simplify complex issues, making judge TV justice always remediable. As a studio audience member I look at the programs dramaturgically and study how they are produced and directed. From this internal position I scrutinize the seams of production and analyze what happens before, during, and after the "show." Accumulatively, my analysis regards the performativity of judge TV as consequential and as performing a popular, varied, and decentralized rendering of justice by and for people most excluded (and historically excluded) from legal protections and equal access to courts and counsel. Within television's symbolic space, judge TV stages an alternative to small claims courts where personal preference, comedy, opinionated rants, and expeditious process are employed at the service of fabular and moralistic performances staged as small claims trials. |
