aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Judge Judy’s crowd-pleasing bullying injustice

Last week I endorsed Malcolm Gladwell’s suggestion that hiding the race of a defendant in a legal proceeding would alter its outcome. Adam Cohen in the Times today says Judge Judy brings up another, equally important point:

Since the French Revolution, Western society has been committed to the ideal that social status should not matter in court. The American legal system, perhaps more than any other, insists that all men and women are equal before the law, but legal sociologists can show that the reality is far different. In “Sociological Justice,” a book he wrote for a popular audience, [University of Virginia social sciences professor Donald] Black argues that the legal system would be fairer if efforts were made to hide information about the parties’ social status from judges and juries. Judge Judy, of course, is an extreme example of the reverse; she is constantly asking about people’s idleness and bad debts, and generally digging for what Professor Black calls the “social geometry of the case.”

It is hardly surprising that “Judge Judy” is so popular. People like to see social hierarchies reinforced, and people who violate social norms “taught responsibility” or otherwise punished. Humiliation is also a traditional crowd pleaser, and an important part of virtually every reality show on television. The real problem with “Judge Judy” is not that it is worse than most reality TV, which it is not. It is that for an audience that runs well into the millions every week, it is blurring the line between justice and social bullying.