• Quoting someone else’s words, for any reason, under any circumstances, is hearsay and therefore inadmissible in small-claims court.

  Once or twice a year, just to confuse us, Her Honor applies the “hearsay“ concept correctly. But then it’s back to normal for another six months. In one especially priceless episode, she snapped “Don’t tell me what you said to him”—and only just caught herself before going on to say that, presumably, that would be hearsay.

• If the judge hasn’t heard of it, it doesn’t exist.

  If you require medical treatment as a result of a motor vehicle accident, better make sure the doctor writes the words out in full. The judge has never seen the abbreviation “MVA”.

  Do not waste your time bringing out a map to demonstrate that Vancouver, Washington is a suburb of Portland, Oregon. If it sounds as if it’s next to Canada, it is next to Canada.

• In the United States, you are innocent until arraigned.

  If your case goes to trial, it doesn’t matter if the jury finds you not guilty by a unanimous vote after five minutes’ token discussion. “Not guilty” doesn’t mean innocent. It just means the DA couldn’t prove it. If you hadn’t been guilty as sin, you would never have been arraigned.

• The judge in a civil case is legally bound by the findings of any preceding criminal case. If there has been a conviction or even a plea bargain, your job is done.

  You gotta wonder where she gets this stuff. Possibly that family court in New York had its own unique set of rules, and Her Honor assumes the same rules apply everywhere.

• The statute of limitations is six weeks, except in personal-injury cases, where it is three days.
• Inability to pay is a valid legal defense. “I’ll pay you back when I can” or “. . . when I get back on my feet” is a legally meaningful utterance.

  There is no requirement of proof. Unlike all other defenses, claims of inability to pay are always true.

  And, finally: These claims remain valid even when uttered on TV shows that pay the judgement, so the loser would not be out of pocket anyway.

• If the judge doesn’t know the applicable law—or is not aware that there is an applicable law—the litigants are bound by anything the judge chooses to make up.

  Do not waste your time trying to explain the concept of a pre-emptively suspended drivers’ license.

  Do not waste your time trying to explain that thirty days’ notice is mandated by state law, so there was no need to put it in the contract.

  Do not waste your time trying to explain the concept of an “unmarked crosswalk at an inter­section” as defined in most states’ vehicle codes.

  Here are the other permutations:
  • If the judge does know the applicable law, but doesn’t like what it says, the litigants are—et cetera, as above. This is binding arbitration, not a courtroom.
  • If the judge knows the relevant law, and agrees with it, then she must do what it says. It’s the law.
• The bailiff can sometimes be your friend.

  My favorite to date: In a case involving damage to a valuable bicycle, Her Honor turns to the bailiff and asks what is the most expensive bike he has ever seen. Clearly he is expected to say something like $500. Instead he says $10,000, supplying helpfully “It was baaad”. I wonder if the plaintiff realizes how lucky he was.

• A “no contest“ plea is legally the same as a “guilty” plea.

  Guess where the difference is significant. When the criminal case is followed by a civil case. Like the one you’re watching on TV right now.

• No one in the United States has ever pled guilty to a crime they did not commit.

  If they tried, the judge would speedily detect the fraud and put a stop to it.

• A salaried public defender will represent you just as well as a privately retained attorney.

  Arcane legal point that appears to have escaped the judge’s notice: Unlike attorneys in private practice—and unlike prosecutors—public defenders do not have the option of turning down a case. And their day has the same 24 hours as yours and mine.

• The judge in a civil hearing can demand that you prove your innocence of a criminal charge, even if nobody has ever raised the charge.

  Fortunately your average TV litigant does not know this, or Her Honor‘s follicle-testing lab would be out of business.

  Come to think of it, some litigant somewhere must have got wise. I haven’t heard much talk of on-the-spot drug testing in recent years.

• The “clean hands” doctrine means that if you have done anything wrong at any time in any way with respect to the defendant, you have waived your right to bring suit.

  If you spill a drop of paint, you cannot sue the homeowner who didn’t pay you for remodeling the whole structure.

  If you are one day late paying rent, you cannot sue the landlord for changing the locks and putting your property in the street.

• Courts don’t address anticipatory breaches of contract.

  Drat! There go several thousand attorneys’ paychecks. Flown off to Aruba along with the guy who owed you six weeks’ salary.

• Plaintiffs in a civil case are not allowed to amend the dollar amount they are asking for, because the defendant has had no chance to prepare a reply.

  Need I spell it out? If the defense against a charge of first-degree murder is different from the defense against a charge of manslaughter, then obviously the defense against a $750 damage claim must be different from that against a $600 claim for the same damage.

• If a loss is potentially covered by insurance, you are required to submit it to insurance.

  As we all know, insurance companies have printing presses in their basements. In a courtroom context, this means—

  • Submitting a claim to insurance can have no possible effect on your future premiums or insurability.
  • There is no earthly reason for an insurance company to go after the person who really caused the damage. So if you submit something to insurance, no human will ever have to pay.

  At some point when I wasn’t paying attention, someone must have elucidated this legal issue to Her Honor. Or possibly her own rates went up as a result of submitting too many claims. So I sometimes find her advising people not to put an expense through insurance. Isn’t it wonderful how you can be the smartest person on the planet, know absolutely everything, never be wrong—and still calmly change your behavior when it suits you?

• If you give someone permission to use your property, you are respon­sible for any damages.

  Bailment? What’s that?

• If you have a car loan, you are required by law to have collision insurance.

  Look it up. The lender may require full coverage. The law doesn’t care.

• Fines are a newfangled alternative to the age-old tradition of punishment by incarceration.

  Hammurabi? Never heard of the guy.

• If a pedestrian has the right of way, all cars will stop for them. If they didn’t stop, it means you didn’t have the right of way.
• A month-to-month tenancy means that a landlord can evict any tenant at any time under any circum­stances for any reason—or none at all—provided he gives thirty days’ notice. Conversely, a fixed-term lease means that any tenant can move out at any time by paying a few months’ extra rent.
• The police don’t lie and are never mistaken.
• Throughout the United States, all laws and all law-enforcement bodies are exactly the same. The information given or service provided to any random person is therefore identical to what Judith Sheindlin would receive under the same circumstances.

  If you try to say otherwise, you are either misinformed, lying or both. For example:

  • All police stations keep the same hours and have the same telephone number—namely 911. No matter how small your town, police stations do not have office telephone numbers and they are never closed.
  • The procedure for making a police report, or obtaining a later copy, is exactly the same everywhere.
  • All jurisdictions have the same rules and procedures for obtaining a restraining order. There is no such thing as a Civil Harrassment Order.
• There are no laws governing habitability of rental housing. Landlords have no legal obligations.

  If there is a leak in the roof, no heat, and the refrigerator stops working, tenants have a simple remedy: move out.

  • Conversely, tenants have no obligations except to pay rent and to leave the place clean. Exact degree of cleanliness depends on the judge’s mood.
• If you get money from any governmental source of any kind, it can only be used for immediate, hand-to-mouth living expenses.

  Do you set aside part of your disability check to save for unreim­bursed medical bills, or luxuries such as new glasses every few years? Or, conversely, do you set aside part of your lump-sum financial aid for end-of-semester expenses?

  Better not lend those savings to anyone else. If you didn’t spend the money at once, then obviously you didn’t need it and it legitimately belongs to—well, no, not the taxpayer. That would be silly. But it was clearly a gift and the recipient is free to keep it.

  The foregoing does not, of course, apply to Social Security payments given to retired judges.

• Laws never change.

  If a given law was in effect at the time Judith Sheindlin passed the New York State bar exam in 1965, the identical law applies today.

• “The answer is either Yes or No.”

  Reality is binary.

• There is no such thing as a dental emergency.

  The scary thing is that the judge didn’t make this up herself. She learned it from her father, a dentist. Fortunately, simple arithmetic suggests that any parent of Judge Judy has long since retired from active practice. So there is no need to worry if your tooth was broken, exposing the pulp, and you need immediate treatment.

• Empty threats are just as effective from a judge as from the parent of a toddler.

  Count how many times Her Honor has said “If you interrupt again, I’m dismissing your case.” Count how many times she has actually done it.

• “If you tell the truth, you don’t need a good memory.”

  Human memory is linear. Your recollection of past events is always clearest immedi­ately after the event.

• If you ask a small child “Do you know the difference between the truth and a lie?” and the child answers Yes, it means that the child knows the difference.

  This remains true, no matter how often it is demon­strated to be untrue.

  • Here, too, someone must have read the judge the riot act. It’s been a while since I last saw her encouraging a small child to believe that she has the power to put them in jail.
• Body language has no dialects.

  A witness who looks the judge in the eye is telling the truth. A witness who is telling the truth looks the judge in the eye. This remains true even after it has been demon­strated to be untrue.

  • Neither does English.

    Thank Heaven for that bailiff, or Her Honor would still be jumping on African-American witnesses every time they use the word “stay” to mean “dwell” or “abide”.

• All teenagers lie all the time.

  Makes you wonder about Her Honor’s parenting skills, doesn’t it?

• “If it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t true.”

  Fiction is always stranger than truth.

• If two people tell different versions of the same story, one of the two is intentionally and maliciously lying.
• The most effective way to convince people you are more intelligent than they are is to say so.
• If a person has a checking account, that person will never pay any bill, or discharge any debt, by any method other than by writing a check for the exact sum. Documentation of this transaction will remain available forever.
• Nobody over the age of 23 is allowed to be a student.

  You have only one chance to get a classroom education. If you didn’t learn something before age 23, you don’t need to know it. There are no mid-life career changes, and no new information is ever created.

  This age limit applies only to people without dependents. Fathers, regardless of age, are not allowed to continue beyond high school. Mothers can get college degrees, but only if they finish before the cutoff age.

• The second month of the year is called “Febuary”. The word “belies” is a synonym of “defies”, and “inculcate” is a synonym of “implicate”. The words “credulity” and “credi­bility” mean the same thing.

  Oddly enough, Her Honor does appear to know the difference between “oral” and “verbal”. But I may have just imagined this.

  I will not speculate about why someone whose professional life has been divided between New York and California should be incapable of pronouncing common names such as “Vasquez” or “Henriquez”.

For most viewers, Judge Judy remains the show you love to hate. But some people are losing their grip on the “love to” part.

On one side are the lawyers—the real ones, practicing in real courts—and the real judges who work with them. This is where you get the alarming argument that “Syndi-Courts” aren’t just mindless entertainment. They can be actively harmful to the judicial system, because they give potential jurors a severely mistaken idea of how courts are supposed to work, and how judges are supposed to think and act.

On the other side are the litigants. It is normal to feel some disgruntlement when you lose a case. When instead you get out-and-out venom, something is wrong. For comparison, consider litigants’ comments on The People's Court. The losers can be expected to complain that they weren’t allowed to present their case. But viewers have just seen plainly that they did present a case. It just wasn’t good enough. On Judge Judy, on the other hand . . .

It is surely no coincidence that the most incandescent rage comes from people who were recruited to appear on the show after filing in their local Small Claims court. When you enter the court system, you expect justice to behave in a certain way. If, instead, you find yourself on a TV sound stage before a group of actors and extras, you are in for a nasty shock. As it turns out:

• When witnesses raise their hands, it is not because they are too stupid to understand the difference between a courtroom and a second-grade classroom. It is because they have been explicitly instructed to raise their hands if they wish to speak.

  But, you say, isn’t the judge constantly yelling at people to put their hands down?

  Why, yes. Yes, she is. And your point is?

• The recurring theme of “I couldn’t get my documentation together because I only got the court notice the day before yesterday” is not, as any reasonable person would think, just a feeble excuse. This is television—and this is the court system. Surely things are planned weeks and months ahead of time, with a succession of papers to sign at every step? Nope: Litigants may not know until almost literally the eleventh hour that they are expected to present their case tomorrow.
• All parties have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. But not the kind you get in a big-ticket civil suit, where you agree to keep your mouth shut about the other side’s wrongdoings in exchange for a bigger payoff. According to reports, litigants on Judge Judy have to agree not to say anything about the experience itself. This, of course, is contrary to everything you’ve been taught to expect about the courts, where transparency is an inherent part of the process.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, just a human being with connected brain cells. But then, if you could afford a lawyer, you wouldn’t be scouring the Internet for answers, would you?

Q.: Should I take my case to Judge Judy?

A.: Only if you genuinely don’t care whether you win or lose.

Q.: Should I agree to appear on Judge Judy if asked?

A.: Only if you are legally in the wrong.