Law Commons^™

Train Our Jurors, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

Lay jurors are often legally and logically unprepared for trial. In response, it is recommended that jurors receive training in how to make better legal decisions. This chapter suggests that jurors should receive comprehensive training in critical legal doctrines and in how to reason with legal evidence. Jurors who cannot be trained to achieve minimal levels of competence (in the law or in basic reasoning) should be excused from jury service. Suggestions are given as to how policy makers and researchers who are interested in jury reform may wish to proceed.

Questions About Forensic Science: Response, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

THE ESSENTIAL MESSAGE OF OUR REVIEW WAS that forensic individualization/identification science is on course for a "paradigm shift" in which its future will be more scientifically grounded than its past.

Harmon and Budowle take issue with the simple point that traditional forensic science assumes that markings produced by different people and objects are observably different. The notion of uniqueness is widespread in forensic science writing, thinking, and practice. We added the qualifier "discernible" to the uniqueness assumption to indicate that criminalists do not refer to uniqueness in the abstract or as a metaphysical property. They mean that conclusions about object …