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Juries: Arbiters Or Arbitrary?, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

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 …

Juries: Arbiters Or Arbitrary?, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

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 …

Jury Size And The Peremptory Challenge, Richard Lempert

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The article was orginally submitted jointly with Dr. Jay Schulman as prepared testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Improvement of Judicial Machinery. The subcommittee was considering Senate Bill 2074, an omnibus bill which would have required all United States District Courts to switch from twelve to six member juries in civil cases and would have decreased the number of available peremptory challenges in civil cases from three to two. Upon completion of the hearings on this bill, these provisions were deleted from the version sent to the full Committee. It should be noted that most District Courts by local …

Cooperation Between The Bar And The Public In Improving The Administration Of Justice, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

Professor Sunderland compares public participation in the legal systems of the United States and Great Britain. "There must be a partnership between the profession and the laity for improving the administration of justice. Law must become a matter of public concern, and not treated as a mere perquisite of a professional class."