Dec. 6 – Law & Humanities Blog
Cynthia Bond, John Marshall Law School, has published “We, the Judges”: The Legalized Subject and Narratives of Adjudication in Reality Television at 81 UMKC Law Review 1 (2012):
At first a cultural oddity, reality TV is now a cultural commonplace. These quasi-documentaries proliferate on a wide range of network and cable channels, proving adaptable to any audience demographic. Across a variety of types of “reality” offerings, narratives of adjudication — replete with “judges,” “juries,” and “verdicts”— abound. Do these judgment formations simply reflect the often competitive structure or subtext of reality TV? Or is there a deeper, more constitutive connection between reality TV as a genre and narratives of law and adjudication?