Jan Patterson, running
for a second, six-year term on the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals, learned
a little about public awareness of the judiciary while campaigning recently.
The way Patterson tells it, she was informing a group of 8-year-olds about
the responsibilities of an appeals court justice.
"Are you really a judge?" a little one asked.
"I'm a real judge," Patterson said she answered.
"What channel are you on?" the future voter asked.
Austin American Statesman, 9/18/04
at A14
|
American television's legal dramas have moved
beyond midwestern living rooms to the apartments of Beijing.1
Italians watched a dubbed version of Perry Mason in the 50s that still resonates today.2
The British produced Rumpole of the Bailey and Germany's answer
to Judge Judy is Richterin Barbara Salesch. Generations from
now, a descendant of Gene Roddenberry, who began his television career
as a police advisor for Mr. District Attorney, will be writing sci-fi/legal
dramas for the inhabitants of a distant planet. These characters represent the American legal system to us and to the rest of the world and their impact has been enormous.
The fictional lawyer and reality courtroom
programs have entertained us since the heydays
of radio and the golden age of television and they have both influenced
and been influenced by our perceptions of justice and the legal process.
The crusading district attorney and the female lawyer with personal problems
are characters the audience has admired and identified with for the past
70 years. Now that former prosecutors are legal analysts for talk shows
and defense lawyers play themselves in sit-coms, the line between fact
and fiction, entertainment and news, has blurred. Real judges hand down
real decisions after 5 minutes of testimony at the same time that a year-long
actual trial can be observed from the comfort of one's couch. For most
people, this will be as close as they get to law. Nowadays, when people
go into a courtroom, they expect Judge Judy on the bench and assume their
attorney will bring down the "real" bad guy.
This website aims to act as a jumping off
point for those interested in pursuing research on the subject of tv lawyers.
Shows include not only the major courtroom dramas like Perry Mason
or L. A. Law, but any program that has a significant and regularly
recurring lawyer character. The courtroom reality programs may also stretch
the definition but at least Comedy Central's Let's Bowl, where individuals
settle disputes in a modern trial by battle, did not make the grade. There
are several components in the site: a timeline history
of television technology, separate annotated lists of fictional
lawyer and courtroom reality shows,
a combined chronological list, a list
of major awards, and a bibliography.
If you have suggestions for program additions,
you can email the website's author, Marlyn
Robinson, reference librarian at Tarlton Law Library.
1. "All rise." The judge enters the court in a black
robe. She's 25, loquacious and the cutest justice the show's producers
could find. With a rap of her gavel, the first case begins. Standing before
her is the defendant, a Beijing resident who keeps a pet donkey
in his apartment. The outraged plaintiff argues that farm animals aren't
allowed in city homes. The defendant retorts that his donkey has
never lived on a farm so it isn't a farm animal. Well, says the plaintiff,
Beijing residents aren't allowed to keep dogs bigger than a Pekinese.
A donkey isn't a dog, answers the defendant. After 10 minutes of
legal repartee, it's time for the judge to decide.
China's 340 million television households have never watched anything
quite like this. The show, called TV Court, is a knockoff of America's
popular reality courtroom series Judge Judy--and it's brought to you by
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp." "A Dose Of Reality; News Corp. brings cheesy
TV to China but can't reach a mass audience--yet," Time International,
3/ 3/03, at 44
2. It was standing room only in the largest courtroom
at Milan's Palace of Justice. About five minutes after the trial began,
a defense lawyer rose and said, 'Mi oppongo, Signor Presidente' -- 'Your
honor, I object.' At those words, everyone in the court, including the
judge, broke into a thunderous round of applause. It might be a moment
no one in that courtroom will forget.
It was also the first time that interruption, considered
routine in American procedures, had been heard in an Italian
court.
The trial last month in Milan was make-believe of the
best kind: the rehearsal for a legal revolution to take place on, and forever
after, Oct. 24. On that date Italy's antiquated criminal code
will be changed and court procedures replaced by processes modeled on Anglo-American
law. Everyone in the courtroom that morning was either a judge
or a lawyer, assigned as a member of the audience or reciting a role cast
from a script based on a real trial (involving a stolen fur coat).
The change is already being hailed as an American import.
Even though U.S. legal procedures are the legitimate offspring of English
law, Italy's new procedures are being referred to as 'bringing
in Perry Mason' -- the lawyer invented by the late novelist Erle
Stanley Gardner. "Italian Law Is Moving Into 'Perry Mason' Era," Los
Angeles Times, 5/28/89, Part 5 at 2 |
