Judging or Entertaining?

A fair amount of the lively discussion was devoted to the question: If the courtroom cases are serious, and they are intended to impart important moral lessons about the differences between right and wrong, then should it matter who the plaintiffs and defendants are, and how they, and their claims, come across on the TV screen? Both of our judges were quick to point out that their producers recruit interesting cases and the people attached to them. These courtrooms shows may be authentic demonstrations of dispute resolution, but they also have the burden to hold the attention of TV audiences, who might otherwise switch to a soap opera, a cable movie, or even worse, a competing courtroom TV show. There is always the power and prerogative of the remote control. But this invites the question: Aren't all disputes interesting in some way, or is it that what's most important are the personalities behind the disputes. Judges respond to people as people; they don't merely, and coldly, only deal with the legal claim as a matter of law, divorced of the emotion that is an indispensable part of the cases before them.