Sarah Kozinn

The Judging Public

The entertainment industry’s limited imagining of its public as potential purchasers, as audiences lured by advertisers into the web of capitalist circulation, ignores this public’s potential as participatory agents in subject formation. The focal point of my work is Judge TV shows (such as Judge Judy and The People’s Court), a television inter-genre, a bastard child of the game show and talk show, that through reproductions of small claims trials discursively constructs techniques of normalization. Judge TV administers justice with personality, dispelling Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the necessary universality of law in favor of particular and local logics of justice and neo-liberal rehearsals of privatized justice. The judge’s decisions are legally binding third party arbitrations, yet the trials are staged in television studios with directors, producers, and scripts. This precarious tango between law and entertainment shatters the assumed insularity of the juridical field (Bourdieu), illustrating the permeability of social/aesthetic boundaries. What seems like entertainment has legal effects, and vice versa. The viewing publics are both the program’s audience and complicit participants in the administration of pop law through call-in lines, online chat rooms, in-studio voting, and post-trial interviews. Integrating tropes of medico-legal discourses the judges perform therapeutic interventions, asking litigants to confess, and therefore legitimize the extension of punitive power beyond the bounds of law and into the realm of the litigants’ behavior (Foucault). The inclusion of the shows’ publics in these normalizing discourses simulates community, common sense, and consensus while splintering the interlocutor (the judge) from his bounding to the role of the expert, creating a multi-vocal process of on-television subject formation under juridical-medico pretexts. This paper will explore the Judge TV genre as a generative site that calls attention to the active, formative role of its viewing public in shaping itself, creating expectations of the legal subject, and participating in pop culture’s rapid encroachment into the juridical field.