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This monumental and comprehensive volume reviews more than 50 years of empirical research on civil and criminal juries and returns a verdict that strongly supports the jury system.
This book explores why juries have declined in power and how the federal government and the states have taken the jury's authority.
How are juries selected in the United States? What forces influence juries in making their decisions? Are some cases simply beyond the ability of juries to decide? How useful is the entire jury system? In this important and accessible book, a prominent expert on constitutional law examines these and other issues concerning the American jury system. Randolph N. Jonakait describes the historical and social pressures that have driven the development of the jury system; contrasts the American jury system to the legal process in other countries; reveals subtle changes in the popular view of juries; examines how the news media, movies, and books portray and even affect the system; and discusses the empirical data that show how juries actually operate and what influences their decisions. Jonakait endorses the jury system in both civil and criminal cases, spelling out the important social role juries play in legitimizing and affirming the American justice system.
This magisterial book explores fascinating cases from American history to show how juries remain the heart of our system of criminal justice - and an essential element of our democracy. No other institution of government rivals the jury in placing power so directly in the hands of citizens. Jeffrey Abramson draws upon his own background as both a lawyer and a political theorist to capture the full democratic drama that is the jury. We, the Jury is a rare work of scholarship that brings the history of the jury alive and shows the origins of many of today's dilemmas surrounding juries and justice.
This volume summarizes what is known about the psychology of juries and offers a robust research agenda to keep scholars busy in years to come.
... The purpose of this handbook is to acquaint trial jurors with the general nature and importance of their role as jurors; explains some of the language and procedures used in court, and offers some suggestions helpful to jurors in performing their duty ...
The jury trial is one of the formative elements of American government, vitally important even when Americans were still colonial subjects of Great Britain. When the founding generation enshrined the jury in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were not inventing something new, but protecting something old: one of the traditional and essential rights of all free men. Judgment by an “impartial jury” would henceforth put citizen panels at the very heart of the American legal order. And yet at the dawn of the 21st century, juries resolve just two percent of the nation’s legal cases and critics warn that the jury is “vanishing” from both the criminal and civil courts. The jury’s critics point to sensational jury trials like those in the O. J. Simpson and Menendez cases, and conclude that the disappearance of the jury is no great loss. The jury’s defenders, from journeyman trial lawyers to members of the Supreme Court, take a different view, warning that the disappearance of the jury trial would be a profound loss. In The Jury in America, a work that deftly combines legal history, political analysis, and storytelling, Dennis Hale takes us to the very heart of this debate to show us what the American jury system was, what it has become, and what the changes in the jury system tell us about our common political and civic life. Because the jury is so old, continuously present in the life of the American republic, it can act as a mirror, reflecting the changes going on around it. And yet because the jury is embedded in the Constitution, it has held on to its original shape more stubbornly than almost any other element in the American regime. Looking back to juries at the time of America's founding, and forward to the fraught and diminished juries of our day, Hale traces a transformation in our understanding of ideas about sedition, race relations, negligence, expertise, the responsibilities of citizenship, and what it means to be a citizen who is “good and true” and therefore suited to the difficult tasks of judgment. Criminal and civil trials and the jury decisions that result from them involve the most fundamental questions of right, and so go to the core of what makes the nation what it is. In this light, in conclusion, Hale considers four controversial modern trials for what they can tell us about what a jury is, and about the fate of republican government in America today.
This book explores efforts by women to gain the right to sit on juries in the United States. After they won the vote, many organized women in the early twentieth century launched a new campaign to further expand their citizenship rights. The work here tells the story of how women in fifteen states pressured lawmakers to change the law so that women could take a place in the jury box. The history shows that the jury movements that tailored their tactics to the specific demands of the political and cultural context succeeded more rapidly in winning a change in jury law.
Places the idea of jury duty into perspective, noting its importance as a constitutional responsibility, and describes ways in which the experience may be enriched.
Takes us inside the jury room in seven cases ; tells us how juries go wrong, and how this can be corrected.