ABSTRACT
The juridico-entertainment complex fuses a highly legalistic American culture with people forms of entertainment and their processes of governance. It transforms legal proceedings and legal conflict into consumable commodities that purport to educate and enlighten but simultaneously titillate, amuse, and otherwise entertain a mass audience. This chapter begins with a discussion of regimes, and addresses a theory of how regimes end. A constitutional regime, like any other regime, must channel and control emergent forms of power, both internal and external to that regime, if it is to endure. Political scientists who study courts do not often use the term regime – at least not within the study of American politics. The JEC is, simultaneously, something old and something new in American politics. In one sense, the JEC represents the extension of prevailing political practices to the judiciary. The dominance of public opinion politics and the hypersensitivity of contemporary politicians to polling numbers is increasingly remarked upon and bemoaned.
