Thank you, your honor, may I have another? The stubbornly seductive perils of justice porn.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

OK, LET'S SEE, there's Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Cristina, Judge Milian, Judge Hatchett, Judge Mathis, that crazy guy who uses a baseball bat for a gavel, the, uh, um ... damn! It is now officially harder to name every reality TV courtroom "judge" than it is to name every Supreme Court justice. (Souter, Alito, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Stevens, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Breyer!)

Five years ago, there were seven fake judges giving us our day (and occasional evening hour) in court. Now there are nearly twice that many, with three new shows (Judge Karen, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and Family Court With Judge Penny) debuting in September 2008 alone. At least one other, Street Judge, is on the way. They're there because in the ever-shrinking world of television syndication, where competition from cable and the Internet has made Oprah-sized hits as rare as silk ascots on The Jerry Springer Show, the new dream is a steady 1.5 Nielsen rating on a weekly budget of no more than $500,000. Justice porn, it turns out, is a fairly reliable way to achieve that end: Find a sassy real-life jurist with an itch for the big time, throw some penny-ante miscreants at her mercy, and let the premature adjudication begin.

Explicitly moral, obscenely didactic, showcasing a perversely distorted view of the American legal system, justice porn is a potent, ubiquitous presence in our lives, and at least as influential as the cartoon mayhem of Saints Row 2 or Young Jeezy's latest ode to thug life. And yet has the Federal Communications Commission's airwave fresheners ever knitted their vigilant brows over Judge Judy's contempt for the petitioners who enter her chambers seeking some facsimile of fairness ? Will Hillary Clinton ever make alarmist speeches about the way these shows desensitize viewers to due process while glorifying judicial misconduct? When will the obsessive-compulsive filth inspectors at the Parents Television Council record every act of gratuitous gavel banging that occurs on these shows over a two-week period? Don't they know that grown-ups--naive and malleable grown-ups with a natural curiosity about civil litigation--are watching?

Despite the genre's emphasis on "real cases" and "real people," justice porn jurists act as if they've been possessed by the quirky spirit of David E. Kelley. Judge Milian addresses a defendant as "honey" in the process of berating him for referring to his secretary as "my girl." Judge Hatchett sentences a 14-year-old hellcat to...