TV Judges and Tort Reform

Joshua Wilson and Erin Ackerman have published "TV Judges and the Civil Law Narrative" as a Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

This is a collaborative study examining the relationship between popular reality-based judge television shows, 'tort tales,' and the politics of tort reform. TV judge shows share or approximate many features of the tort tale described by Haltom and McCann in Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis. The question driving our research is whether these TV Judge shows contribute to tort tales' conservative anti-litigation message or, instead, generate counter-narratives about the civil law system. Since tort reform is constantly a political issue, this study addresses one way in which popular support for tort reform might be mobilized.

The Geography of Crime; Crime and Reality TV

Found while I was looking for something else:

Lisa Kadonaga, Strange Countries and Secret Worlds in Ruth Rendell's Crime Novels, 88 Geographical Review 413-428 (July 1998).

If you're interested in crime, gender, and reality TV, here's something of interest:

Gray Cavender, Lisa Bond-Maupin, and Nancy C. Jurik, The Construction of Gender in Reality Crime TV, 13 Gender and Society 643-663 (October 1999).

Full texts available via JSTOR.