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Television cases are not a fair depiction of the American legal system. Too often it looks as though the person with the most money to hire the cleverest attorney wins the contest. In these contests, the judge is often a referee who must wait for one of the attorneys to cry, "Objection!" before he or she can step in to decide if a piece of evidence or the questioning of a witness is valid. Normally, American judges don't gather evidence as judges do in many systems; instead they look only at what the attorneys bring them, so the evidence may be only as good as the attorneys care to make it. Unfortunately, TV trials rarely show that in the American system, judges can and do step in to ask for additional information or to limit questioning of a witness. It is true that the system is adversarial and that most of the questioning is done by the attorneys; however, to compare television courtroom drama to real life would be like comparing a pocket calculator to a powerful computer.

电视中播放的案例并不能准确地描绘出美国司法制度的形象。他们反映的经常是一个非常富有的人聘请一位最精明的律师去赢得诉讼，在审判中，法官常常仅作为一个裁判，他们一定要等到一方律师大叫“反对！”时才介入其中，以决定某份证据或者对某位证人的发问是否有效。美国法官通常不会像其他司法制度下的同行们那样去自己收集证据，而仅仅对双方律师提交的证据进行审查；如此一来，证据如何完全取决于律师自身的意愿。不幸的是，电视里的审判很少展示在美国司法制度中，法官能够并且也确实会介入庭审中去询问问题或者限制对证人的发问。美国司法审判体制确实是对抗式的，大多数的发问由律师完成。但是，如果我们把电视里的法庭审判比做便携式计算器的话，那么，现实生活中的审判就好比功能强大的电子计算机。