Americans once trusted Judge Judy more than the entire Supreme Court
A 2013 Reader's Digest poll found Americans had more faith in a television arbitrator than in all nine Supreme Court justices. Judith Sheindlin earned that trust the hard way, hearing over 20,000 family-court cases in New York before a newspaper profile and a 60 Minutes segment made her famous.
Judith Blum arrived on October 21, 1942, and grew up in Brooklyn in an apartment on Parkside Avenue shared with extended family. Her father Murray was a dentist she adored; her mother Ethel managed an office. After James Madison High School she took a government degree at American University in 1963 and a law degree from New York Law School in 1965, the year she passed the bar. A corporate job at a cosmetics company bored her within two years, and she stepped away to raise her children.
A friend's tip took her into family-court prosecution in 1972. Mayor Ed Koch made her a criminal-court judge in 1982, and four years later she became supervising judge of the family court's Manhattan division. She disliked being described as tough or harsh, but the reputation stuck. In February 1993 Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times profiled her as someone set on making the courts serve ordinary people, and CBS followed with a 60 Minutes piece. Her first book appeared in 1996, the same year she stepped down from the bench.
Judge Judy premiered on September 16, 1996, and ran until July 23, 2021, twenty-five seasons in all. Her bailiff Petri Byrd, who had already served her in the Manhattan family court, became the longest-serving bailiff in the genre. The programme topped the Nielsen court-show ratings throughout, often pulling nine to ten million viewers a day and sometimes beating Oprah. From 2009 until the end it was the highest-rated show in daytime television. The writer Brendan Koerner argued its appeal lay in offering a fantasy of swift justice with no lawyers, no loose ends and no appeals.
Guinness recognised her in 2015 as the longest-serving television arbitrator, and she received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2019. Her streaming follow-up, Judy Justice, began in November 2021 and won the Daytime Emmy for courtroom programming in 2022, making her the only arbitrator to win for two different shows. She has announced its finale for October 22, 2026, ending her on-screen career.
Source: Judy Sheindlin
