2
Daytime court programs proliferated at a specific moment, claiming to
provide public education as well as a cheap stream of profitable commercial
programming. The debut of Judge Judy in the mid-1990s—the decade that gave
birth to the Telecommunications Act of 1996---is significant in this regard. The
Act has been faulted for granting media corporations carte blanche license for
further expansion and synergy, and for entrusting the deregulated market with
“public interest” goals in broadcasting (Aufderheide, 1999). Critics have likened
the legislation to the neoliberal forces that propelled the Welfare Reform Act of
1996, and fuel the privatization of public institutions, from the postal system to
education (McChesney, 1999). What have not been addressed, however, are the
cultural implications of these parallels.
Rather than dismissing Judge Judy as a self-evident example of the
market’s deleterious impact on public life, this paper considers how its cultural
presence has helped instill privatized, feminized templates for citizenship that
complement the downsizing of public institutions, the elimination of New Deal
capitalist reforms and the collapsing concept of collective, public responsibility.
Judge Judy is a cultural site where neoliberal conceptions of the public interest
have, in fact, materialized on commercial television. By fusing the privatized
signifiers of law and order with a private pedagogy of the self, Judge Judy
Convention