UCLA Law Professor Was Star of Three Network Shows

This is the third in a series of “55-Plus” columns on courtroom reality shows. To read the previous columns on the subject, click here.

On Oct. 13, 1958, “Day in Court” went on the air as a Monday-through-Friday ABC daytime offering, with UCLA Law Professor Edgar Allan Jones Jr. presiding three days a week, handling both civil and criminal cases. (William Gwinn was his alternate.)

Jones already was appearing weekly as the judge on ABC’s “Traffic Court,” a nighttime program which began in Los Angeles as a local show.

“Day in Court” featured actual attorneys trying the cases, with actors appearing as parties and witnesses.

As if Jones did not have enough to do with two shows on the air, ABC gave him additional duties: presiding weekly on a nighttime version of “Day in Court.” That show, “Accused,” aired from December, 1958 to September, 1959.

All this was in addition to Jones maintaining his fulltime job as a UCLA law professor — which remained his primary calling.

Remarkably, he also continued to conduct labor arbitrations on the side. “It was a frenetic period in our family life,” he related, adding that “we managed to hold it all together because of the superwoman whom I married.” The “we” included the couple’s 11 children.

The April 5, 1960 issue of “TV Guide” termed Jones “[o]ne of the big stars of daytime television,” but quoted him as saying:

“My lifetime career is teaching law. I cannot and will not jeopardize that, though television is interesting and remunerative. If I am to be a good teacher — and that’s the important thing — I can’t afford to become enmeshed in TV.”

He told me that while he did get fan mail, he read only those few letters that were forwarded to him by his staff. “I didn’t want television to impinge on my career as a law professor,” he said.

Unlike other celebrities, Jones did not send out autographed photos of himself.

He was able to devote his workday to his academic chores by taping his shows on Saturdays and weeknights.

On one session of “Traffic Court,” he recounted, he interrupted the taping. The traffic citee was Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, who had actually been given a ticket in connection with stopping his car after it had been hit by a baseball, getting out of the vehicle, and tossing the ball back to the Little Leaguers playing in a fenced schoolyard.

During the walk-through, the judge instructed Koufax’s witnesses, three or four Little Leaguers, to remove their baseball caps. Apparently, the “summer replacement director,” without Jones’ knowledge, tried to create controversy by telling them later not to doff their head apparel.

The taping started; the kids had their caps on; Jones asked them to take the caps off. “They ignored me,” he called to mind. “I got up. I walked off the bench.”

Inside the control room, he said, he castigated the director, telling him: “You just cost several hundred dollars.” Taping started over — the “kids were so abashed,” he recalled — and their caps came off promptly upon being directed to remove them.

Real cases were selected, but ones that had “twists.” Here’s a listing for the Nov. 3, 1960 “Day in Court” show: “A man is accused of attempting a bank robbery by using hypnosis.”

Top UCLA third-year law students who otherwise would have needed to work 20 hours a week to support themselves were paid an equivalent sum to conduct five hours a week of legal research for the show, with the proviso that they donate the remaining 15 hours to the law review or equivalent activities. The product of their research was utilized by writers, who fashioned scripts that were unseen by Jones until the rehearsals.

“Day in Court” was watched not only by housewives, but by lawyers and judges “who were home with the flu,” Jones noted.

Jones said he does not recall any communications being drawn to his attention in which any legal ruling of his was questioned. However, he said, he does recall one letter from a trial judge taking him to task. He had appeared on one of the shows with a “big white bandage” over an eye, following an operation on the eyeball. The judge was “absolutely outraged,” Jones recounted, admonishing him that “no real judge would show up in a courtroom like that.”

Jones’ tenure as a judge of “Day in Court” ended in October, 1964. His show had been No. 1 in the daytime ratings — with a weekly total of about 20 million viewers — and “General Hospital,” a soap opera, had been No. 2. But then “General Hospital” pulled ahead of “Day in Court,” so, the network programmers reasoned, “Day in Court” should be turned into a soap, replete with bedroom scenes.

“There was no way I could have gone along with that,” Jones told me.

A UPI columnist, Rick Du Brow, commented Oct. 30, 1964:
“It is irritating to watch how ABC-TV’s respectable afternoon show, ‘Day in Court,’ has been turned into a soap opera in the current network trend toward serials.

“The major destruction of the program’s past concept was brought about this week with the beginning of a 10-part continuing story. Notable by his absence, because of his rejection of the new formula, is the man who used to be the star and the main reason for watching ‘Day in Court,’ Edgar Allan Jones Jr. …

“‘Day in Court’ and television have lost a remarkable performer in Jones. There was no better ad libber in the television medium — and it was necessary, for the program’s authenticity, that he be accomplished in this skill. For it was Jones’ belief that though the shows and cases were thoroughly researched by top students, tones and innuendoes could give different impressions and lead to different conclusions when acted out — and to react naturally and with legal logic, he would often ad lib, even decisions, requiring sharp reactions from his casts.”

The show went off the air four months later.

In 1991, Jones retired as a law professor after 40 years at UCLA. He’s written a novel, “Mr. Arbitrator,” and is working on another book, “Break a Leg, Professor” (on a law school professor with a TV show).

At 82, he continues to handle labor arbitrations, which he’s been doing since 1953.

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Next week: Courtroom television shows proliferate in the late 1950s.