Save The Date! April 25th Forum Event With Judge Marilyn Milian and Judge Alex Ferrer!
The Forum on Law, Culture, and Society is excited to announce our next Forum Event. Seating for this event is limited, please use this link to register!
Courtrooms as TV Entertainment: A Conversation with Judge Marilyn Milian from “The People’s Court,” and Judge Alex Ferrer of “Judge Alex.”
Date(s): 04.25.07 Wed
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: One Time Warner Center
Sponsor: Forum on Law, Culture, & Society. With support from Time Warner and Entwistle & Cappucci LLP.
Program Description:
Judge Marilyn Milian of “The People’s Court” and Judge Alex Ferrer of “Judge Alex” headline the Fordham Law School Forum on Law, Culture & Society’s April 25 program, Courtrooms as TV Entertainment.
The conversation will tune in to the phenomenon of daytime TV courtrooms: how they affect our culture and what they say about those judged- and those transfixed- by TV judgments.
In conversation with Thane Rosenbaum, the Forum’s Director, and in viewing some clips from their shows, the judges will weigh in on why daytime TV courtrooms reflect the public’s fascination with the legal system. Why do viewing audiences revel in the lives of ordinary people fighting over ordinary things? Is it that we seek the daily moral lesson, immediacy, and finality that comes from watching a court case resolve itself before the next commercial break? Are participants seeking their 15 minutes of fame, or are they perhaps longing for their private misdeeds and pain to be aired, and cleansed, by the American public?
Fordham Law School’s Forum on Law, Culture, & Society is made possible through the generous support of Time Warner and Entwistle & Cappucci LLP.
After each Forum, the conversation continues in cyberspace via pod-casting and an interactive blog at: fordhamlawandculture.blogspot.com, also accessible via www.fordhamlawandculture.org.
April 30th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Says:
In behavioral research, we try to identify and control sources of rater bias in determining the reliability and validity of an assessment. Scott Turow’s discussion of judges’ “backstories” is a step in that direction. In the case of TV courtrooms, one might ask, what additional distortions of judgment are contributed by the venue? Among these we should consider special conditions, such as the fact that all judgments are paid by court tv producers; special constraints, such as the time allocated to the segment and the desire to make the segment entertaining; special influences, such as awareness of cameras; and special outcomes, such as the effect of broad public exposure on participants. How do these influence justice, both in the judgment and the impact on litigants? We might then determine, on balance, the degree to which the experience has a positive or negative effect on public education.
Peter Irwin