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The Jury's Response To Business And Corporate Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans
The Jury's Response To Business And Corporate Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Some of the most vociferous criticisms of the jury relate to its performance in cases involving business and corporate wrongdoing. The jury's competence in such cases is assaulted on a variety of fronts. Critics question the jury's factfinding ability in cases with business and corporate parties, and doubt whether lay jurors can understand the often complex and esoteric evidence of business wrongdoing. Others claim that bias and prejudice, rather than evidence, determine jury decisions about businesses and corporations. The presumed biases cut both ways. The generally positive regard in which the public holds business is credited with creating leniency toward …
Responses To Corporate Versus Individual Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans, M. David Ermann
Responses To Corporate Versus Individual Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans, M. David Ermann
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
For many years, researchers assumed that the public was indifferent to corporate wrongdoing, but recent surveys have discovered evidence to the contrary. Taking insights from these data a step further, this study employed an experimental design to examine whether people responded differently to corporate versus individual wrongdoers. We varied the identity of the central actor in a scenario involving harm to workers. Half the respondents were informed that a corporation caused the harm; the remainder were told that an individual did so. Respondents applied a higher standard of responsibility to the corporate actor. For identical actions, the corporation was judged …