Since people are getting picky about word meanings…
I don’t think you know what public TV means. Judge Judy, People’s Court, etc do not air on public TV. They air in syndication on commercial TV stations across the country, not the gov’t/pledge drive funded stations.
I met a woman once who had been a litigant on one of the 2nd or 3rd string court shows’ ( Judge Hatchett, IIRC.) Being a fan of these shows and knowing how the major ones work, I asked her about it specifically.
The one she was on was just a binding arbitration and she got the free trip but didn’t get any award from the show - just a judgement and she had to go after the guy to collect . I can’t remember if she was even able to collect anything.
All are civil cases. Nobody is going to jail. If the word “sue” is used, it’s generally a civil matter.
IMO, the People’s Court does a bit of educating about the law. It’s the only one i can stand - where the judge doesn’t go on irrelevant rants against a plaintiff she doesn’t personally agree with. They follow the local laws from the home state of the plaintiff, and somewhat explain the relevant applicable law.
That’s very interesting. The old People’s Court with Judge Wapner clearly stated that a pool of money was split between the parties. I think I’ve seen reference to that for other TV courts. I haven’t looked all that hard, but I’ve never seen the Judge Judy policy spelled out. I recall one show a long time ago where she reluctantly awarded a plaintiff money then said something like “You better hope he has some money to pay you!”. That made me wonder if she was just issuing judgments, but more often it’s implied that the winning party will get the money from her show. It’s really pointless to get a judgement in some of these small cases, the defendant often hasn’t paid because they don’t have any money, you’ll lose money trying to collect on a $100 judgement from someone who doesn’t have money or just doesn’t want to pay.
Once in a blue moon Judge Judy will explain the law, and do it much better than all the other judges. But if you don’t enjoy her usual method of justice through insult then you might not watch long enough to catch those rare moments. She had a little war of words with Judge Wapner over that issue. Frankly, I prefer her approach to the parade of morons who claim someone ‘borrowed’ them $500 for no reason at all, or never paid rent because the landlord didn’t fix the dripping kitchen faucet.