Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, and the Hyperreality of the Mediated American Jury Trial: the French Perspective on O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn

This study investigates modern French criticism of jury trial mediation in the United States. By engaging the work of twentieth-century French theorists Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as French journalistic reporting on the jury trials of O.J. Simpson, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Casey Anthony, this study argues that mediated images of the American jury trial abandon the pursuit of justice in favor of a consumer capitalist endeavor to create spectacle. Ultimately, jury trial mediation generates a hyperreality in which the media simulates the pursuit of justice with no reference to the “real” pursuit of justice.

In order to examine the progression of jury trial mediation toward the hyperreal, this study situates images of the jury trial within Jean Baudrillard’s four image phases, which mark the transition from the representation of the “real”—defined in this study as the pursuit of justice— to its simulation. Chapter one presents phase one and phase two images through the lens of French intellectual Régine Hollander’s theatrical analysis of courtroom proceedings. Chapter two examines phase three images from the Neo-Marxist and sociological perspectives of Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, phase four images—simulacra with no reference to the “real”—are explored in chapter three. French reporting on the jury trials of Simpson, Anthony, and Strauss-Kahn will appear as case studies at the conclusion of each chapter.

This study suggests that, for French intellectuals and journalists, jury trial mediation in the U.S. loses reference with and ultimately jeopardizes the “real” pursuit of justice. French criticism, along with fundamental differences in French and American legal and media systems, further reveal that the hyperreality of jury trial mediation—born of a cultural, consumer capitalist penchant for spectacle—constitutes a uniquely American phenomenon that would never come to pass in France.