Law Commons^™

Jury Systems Around The World, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Lay citizens participate as decision makers in the legal systems of many countries. This review describes the different approaches that countries employ to integrate lay decision makers, contrasting in particular the use of juries composed of all citizens with mixed decision-making bodies of lay and law-trained judges. The review discusses research on the benefits and drawbacks of lay legal decision making as well as international support for the use of ordinary citizens as legal decision makers, with an eye to explaining a recent increase in new jury systems around the world. The review calls for more comparative work on diverse …

Citizens As Legal Decision Makers: An International Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

On May 1, 2007, Korea's National Assembly approved a judicial reform bill that introduces a jury system for serious criminal cases in Korean courts. The jury system is limited: jurors will only participate in cases where the defendant agrees to a trial by jury, and the jury's verdicts are only advisory to the judge. Nonetheless, Korean citizens now have a remarkable new opportunity to make judgments about criminal trials.

With this law reform, Korea joins a growing list of countries whose legal systems employ citizens as legal decision makers. The United States, Great Britain, and many other common law countries …

Lay Participation In Legal Decision Making: Introduction To Law & Policy Special Issue, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

United States scholarship on lay participation revolves around one predominant form of lay participation, the jury (Hans & Vidmar forthcoming 2004). However, in the legal systems of many countries, laypeople participate as decision makers in other ways. Laypersons serve as judges (Provine 1986), magistrates (Diamond 1993), and private prosecutors (Perez Gil 2003). Lay and law-trained judges may also decide cases together in mixed tribunals (Kutnjak Ivkovi6 2003; Machura 2003; Vidmar 2002). Although diverse in structure, these methods share with the jury a set of animating ideas about lay involvement in legal decision making.

Many of these ideas appear to be …