Litigation Commons^™

Jurors' Judgments Of Business Liability In Tort Cases: Implications For The Litigation Explosion, Valerie P. Hans, William S. Lofquist

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Criticisms of the civil jury, including charges that the jury is biased against business, have been central to debates over the litigation explosion and demands for tort reform. This article seeks to inform these ongoing controversies by examining tort jurors' accounts of how they reached decisions in cases with business parties. Interviews and questionnaire data showed that jurors were skeptical of plaintiff tort cases against businesses, organized their accounts more on the actions and motivations of plaintiffs than on the responsibilities of business, and spoke often of the litigation crisis and the importance of limiting awards.

Attitudes Toward Corporate Responsibility: A Psycholegal Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most striking phenomena in the contemporary legal world is the shift toward holding businesses and corporations responsible for harm. Legal theorists and historians maintain that today business corporations are expected to provide compensation for injuries that in earlier times would have been attributed to individuals or to fate. Furthermore, criminal charges against businesses and business executives are becoming commonplace.

Despite a good deal of legal scholarship on the shift toward holding businesses culpable for harms, psychologists have conducted little systematic research on public views of corporate responsibility. How do people conceptualize the civil liability or criminal responsibility …

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

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 …