Civil Procedure Commons^™

Recent Developments: The Right To A Fair Cross-Section Of The Community And The Black Box Of Jury Pool Selection In Arkansas, Raelynn J. Hillhouse

Arkansas Law Review

A Washington County, Arkansas court conducted a hearing on October 15, 2018 on a criminal defendant’s motion to compel discovery to assure a fair and accurate cross-section of the community for the jury as guaranteed by the United States and Arkansas Constitutions. At the hearing, the jury coordinator for the Circuit Clerk’s office testified that counties may elect to use a state-sponsored jury selection computer program, or they may use proprietary programs. Washington County uses a proprietary computer program to select the jury pool from a list of registered voters. The clerk described how her office takes an extra step …

Disbelief Doctrines, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Employment discrimination law is riddled with doctrines that tell courts to believe employers and not workers. Judges often use these disbelief doctrines to dismiss cases at the summary judgment stage. At times, judges even use them after a jury trial to justify nullifying jury verdicts in favor of workers.

This article brings together many disparate discrimination doctrines and shows how they function as disbelief doctrines, causing courts to believe employers and not workers. The strongest disbelief doctrines include the stray comments doctrine, the same decisionmaker inference, and the same protected class inference. However, these are not the only ones. Even …

Restoring The Civil Jury In A World Without Trials, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

Early in this nation’s history, the civil jury was the most important institutional check on biased and corrupt judges. Recently, concerns about judicial bias, especially in elected state judiciaries, have intensified as new studies demonstrate the extent of that bias. But the jury of Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson is nowhere to be found. In fact, the civil jury is virtually dead. It is used in less than 1% of all civil cases, and even when it makes a rare appearance, the jury’s powers have been significantly curtailed.

This article argues that we must reimagine the civil jury to match the …

The American Jury System: A Synthetic Overview, Richard Lempert

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This essay is intended to provide in brief compass a review of much that is known about the American jury system, including the jury’s historical origins, its political role, controversies over its role and structure, its performance, both absolutely and in comparison to judges and mixed tribunals, and proposals for improving the jury system. The essay is informed throughout by 50 years of research on the jury system, beginning with the 1965 publication of Kalven and Zeisel’s seminal book, The American Jury. The political importance of the jury is seen to lie more in the jury’s status as a one …

The American Jury System: A Synthetic Overview, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This essay is intended to provide in brief compass a review of much that is known about the American jury system, including the jury’s historical origins, its political role, controversies over its role and structure, its performance, both absolutely and in comparison to judges and mixed tribunals, and proposals for improving the jury system. The essay is informed throughout by 50 years of research on the jury system, beginning with the 1965 publication of Kalven and Zeisel’s seminal book, The American Jury. The political importance of the jury is seen to lie more in the jury’s status as a one …

Deselecting Biased Juries, Scott W. Howe

Utah Law Review

Critics of peremptory-challenge systems commonly contend that they inevitably inflict “inequality harm” on many excused persons and should be abolished. Ironically, the Supreme Court fueled this argument with its decision in Batson v. Kentucky by raising and endorsing the inequality claim sua sponte and then purporting to solve it with an approach that preserved peremptories. This Article shows, however, that the central problem is something other than inequality harm to excused persons. The central problem is the harm to disadvantaged litigants when their opponents use peremptories to secure a one-sided jury. This problem can arise often—whenever a venire is slanted …

The Future Of Classwide Punitive Damages, Catherine M. Sharkey

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Conventional wisdom holds that the punitive damages class action is susceptiblenot only to doctrinal restraints imposed on class actions but also to constitutionaldue process limitations placed on punitive damages. Thus, it would seem that theprospects for punitive damages classes are even grimmer than for class actionsgenerally.This conventional picture misunderstands the role of punitive damages and, inparticular, the relationship between class actions and punitive damages. It eitherignores or underestimates the distinctly societal element of punitive damages, whichmakes them especially conducive to aggregate treatment. Furthermore, punitivedamages classes offer a solution to the constitutional due process problem of juriesawarding "classwide" damages in a …

The French Jury At A Crossroads, Valerie P. Hans, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Internationalization Of Lay Legal Decision-Making: Jury Resurgence And Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

When I first began to study the jury more than thirty years ago, the topic of this Journal issue, jury systems around the world, was unthinkable. The use of juries, especially in civil litigation, had long been in decline, to the point of near extinction in England, the land of their birth, and the live question was whether the jury system would endure in the United States. It seemed clear that juries would not continue in their classic form, as many U.S. states, with the Supreme Court's eventual approval, mandated juries of less than twelve people and allowed verdicts to …

The Merger Of Common-Law And Equity Pleading In Virginia, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

This article describes the separation of common law and equity in Virginia leading up to the 2006 merger of common law and equity pleading and the problems that remain to be solved by the courts.

Juries, Hindsight, And Punitive Damage Awards: Failures Of A Social Science Case For Change, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In their recent Arizona Law Review article entitled What Juries Can't Do Well: The Jury's Performance As a Risk Manager,' Professors Reid Hastie and W. Kip Viscusi purport to show that juries are likely to do a poor job in setting punitive damages, largely because jurors cannot avoid the influence of what is called "hindsight bias," or the tendency to see the likelihood of an event higher in retrospect than it would have appeared before it happened. In particular, they argue that hindsight bias and other cognitive biases undermine the utility of jury-set punitive damage awards as risk management devices. …

Settling For A Judge: A Comment On Clermont And Eisenberg, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Trial by Jury or Judge: Transcending Empiricism,1 by Kevin Clermont and Theodore Eisenberg, is not only an important article, it is unique. To most Americans, trial means trial by jury. In fact, over half of all federal trials are conducted without juries2 (including 31% of trials in cases in which the parties have the right to choose a jury3), and the proportion of bench trials in state courts is even higher.4 And yet, while there is a large literature on the outcomes of jury trials and the factors that affect them,5 nobody else has systematically compared trials by jury to …

Telling Tales In Court: Trial Procedure And The Story Model, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

There are three ways in which stories may figure prominently at trials. First, litigants may tell stories to jurors. Not only is there some social science evidence that this happens, but trial lawyers have an instinctive sense that this is what they do. Ask a litigator to describe a current case and she is likely to reply, "Our story is ... " Second, jurors may try to make sense of the evidence they receive by fitting it to some story pattern. If so, the process is likely to feed back on itself. That is, jurors are likely to build a …

The Twelve-Person, Unanimous Jury: Does It Have More Than History To Recommend It?, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

My focus today will be on the twelve-person unanimous jury and on the contrasts between such juries and six-person juries or twelve-person juries than can return verdicts by ten-two or nine-three votes. Until about fifteen years ago, it appeared that the sixth and seventh amendments required all federal juries to have twelve members who reached unanimous verdicts, and it appeared possible that the Supreme Court would force the states to conform to the federal standards. Instead, the court did almost the opposite. It sanctioned juries as small as size six in state criminal cases and federal civil cases, and it …

Juries, Susan E. Morton

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Mind Of The Juror, Stephen Ailes

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Right To Comment On The Failure Of The Defendant To Testify, Andrew A. Bruce

Michigan Law Review

In 1931 the American Law Institute adopted a resolution to the effect that "The judge, the prosecuting attorney and counsel for the defense may comment upon the fact that the defendant did not testify."

In the same year the American Bar Association resolved: "That by law it should be permitted to the prosecution to comment to the jury on the fact that a defendant did not take the stand as a witness; and to the jury to draw the reasonable inferences."

What Price Jury Trials, Jeff B. Fordham

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Courts-Power To Direct Verdicts Where Forbidden By State Constitution

Michigan Law Review

ln a suit for personal injuries the district court of the United States for the district of Arizona directed a verdict for the defendant on the ground that the plaintiff was guilty of contributory negligence. The constitution of Arizona, sec. 5, art. 18 provides: "The defense of contributory negligence or of assumption of risk shall, in all cases whatsoever, be a question of fact and shall, at all times, be left to the jury." Held, that this section is not binding on a federal court sitting in Arizona, and does not prevent such court from directing a verdict when …

Should The Jury System Be Abolished, T. W. A.

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Special Interrogatories, Arlos Jackson Harbert

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trial By Jury In Civil Cases--A Proposed Reform, Robert T. Donley

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Special Interrogatories To The Jury--Their Nature And Purpose--Court's Discretion Relative To Their Submission, G. D. H.

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Abolish The Jury, J. C. Mcwhorter

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Right Of A Jury In A Criminal Case To Render A Verdict Against The Law And The Evidence, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

One George D. Horning was convicted of the criminal offense of doing business as a pawnbroker in the District of Columbia without a license. The jury, which rendered the verdict of guilty, were told by the court, in the course of the charge, that there really was no issue of fact for them to decide; that the evidence showed a course of dealing constituting a breach of the law, and that they were not warranted in capriciously saying that the witnesses for the government and for the defendant were not telling the truth; that it was their duty to accept …

Verdicts, General And Special, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

The most remarkable thing about this case of Georgia v. Brailsford is that a matter of such elementary importance in the daily administration of the law, after being announced in so dramatic a way by the Supreme Court of the United States at the very threshold of its career, could have dropped into oblivion for a hundred years only to be repudiated in a way hardly less dramatic by a sharply divided court. The controversy here disclosed goes to the very heart of the jury system as it has been developed by the common law and is still almost universally …

Cases On Procedure, Annotated. Trial Practice, Edson R. Sunderland

Books

“The present volume is intended to develop and disclose the rational basis for the main principles of practice employed in the trial of civil actions at law. Recourse has been had to the whole body of American case law, and the choice of cases has been determined by the clearness with which the court has shown a logical justification for the decision made….

“The cases have been very freely edited, and everything not germane to the subject for which the case was chosen has been omitted….” --Preface

Some Hints On Defects In The Jury System, James V. Campbell

Articles

The occasional freaks of juries have now and then led some members of the bar to speculate on the policy of doing without them entirely, and some persons no doubt think that they have strong convictions that the jury system has become useless. It is safe to say that these extreme views are altogether speculative, and not based on any careful comparison of results. Most persons who have looked into their own experience with courts and juries are ready to agree that where there is no dispute about main facts, so that the chief dispute is one of law, there …