Abstract
Chapter 4 emphasized the work of lawyers and judges. Now the focus shifts to jurors. Jury duty most clearly connects the legal system’s methods to the ordinary citizen. On virtually every weekday, American citizens find themselves serving as jurors in criminal or civil cases. They become an integral part of the legal system’s approach to dispute resolution. In doing so, they are expected to apply and observe the law’s tools and traditions, even though they do not possess the expertise of lawyers and judges.
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Notes
Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 254.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 22,
which also relies on the following statement from Henry KalvenJr. and Hans Zeisel, The American Jury (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1966), 4: “The jury thus represents a deep commitment to the use of laymen in the administration of justice … it opposes the cadre of professional, experienced judges with this transient, ever-changing, ever-inexperienced group of amateurs.”
Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 85.
Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Effect of Democracy on Language,” in Democracy in America, chap. XVI, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1: 295–296.
Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar, Judging the Jury (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 249.
A Supreme Court justice expressed the same perspective. Hans and Neil Vidmar, Judging the Jury (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 249. A Supreme Court justice expressed the same perspective: “Juries … are not only a safeguard but through their experience and verdicts they exert tremendous influence on the molding of the national character.”
Tom C. Clark, “The American Jury: A Justification,” 1 Valparaiso University Law Review 1 (1996): 4.
John Gastil, E. Pierre Deess, Philip J. Weiser, and Cindy Simmons, The Jury and Democracy: Hotiv Jury Deliberation Promotes Civic Engagement and Political Participation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
U.S. v. Wood, 299 U.S. 177, 185 (1936). “Even the ‘state of mind’ definition lends itself to different interpretations depending on the particular jurisdiction or the judge or the lawyer.” Hans and Vidmar, Judging the Jury, 63. Historical and continuing ambivalence about the meaning and value of impartiality in the ideal juror is discussed at Jeffrey Abramson, We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 17–18, 37–38: “Consider two portraits of the ideal juror. The first and more familiar one highlights the impartiality of the juror and the ignorance that, ironically, makes impartial judgment possible. In this view, the primary qualification of good jurors is that they themselves know nothing beforehand about the case they are about to judge. Precisely because they bring no personal knowledge or opinions to the case, they can judge it with the distance and dispassion that marks impartial justice … In contrast, the second portrait of the ideal juror emphasizes the closeness of the juror to the case on trial: the juror as peer and neighbor … This socalled local knowledge of the neighborhood qualifies the juror to understand the facts of the case and to pass judgment in ways that a stranger to the community could not …In addition, such jurors can judge cases better than strangers because they know the conscience of the community and can apply the law in ways that resonate with the community’s moral values and common sense. Of course, there is considerable tension between these two portraits … The local knowledge model of the jury gradually gave way to the impartial juror ideal.”
Laura Gaston Dooley, “Our Juries, Our Selves: The Power, Perception, and Politics of the Civil Jury,” Cornell Law Review 80 (1995): 325.
Robert A. Ferguson, The Trial in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 52.
Hans and Vidmar, Judging the Jury, 245. See Abramson, We, the Jury, 3, 91, exploring an alleged “gap between the complexity of modern litigation and the qualifications of jurors” and the suspicion that “jurors do not fathom” the judge’s instructions on the law and instead “fall back on their own gut reactions or common sense in deciding how the case should come out.”; Joe S. Cecil, Valerie P. Hans and Elizabeth C. Wiggins, “Citizen Comprehension of Difficult Issues: Lessons from Civil Jury Trials,” American University Law Review 40 (1991): 727;
and Valerie P. Hans and Theodore Eisenberg, “The Predictability of Juries,” DePaul Law Review 60 (2011): 375, 377, which observes, “Another source of the greater perceived unpredictability of juries compared to judges is that jurors are widely presumed to rely on their intuitions, personal biases, and values.”
An overview of jury dynamics is presented in Sun Wolf, Practical Jury Dynamics: From OneJuror’s Trial Perceptions to the Group’s Decision-making Processes (New York: LexisNexis, 2004).
Neil Vidmar and Valerie P. Hans, American Juries: The Verdict (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 225–226.
“The [Supreme] Court has stressed the importance of a variety of roles of the jury, beginning with its essential role in citizenship. It has also stated that representative juries instill public confidence that decisions are being made in an unbiased way, and that they inject community values into decisions. These explanations all assume that juries bring to bear community values on their decisions, rather than acting as a mechanical arm of the law,” Justin D. Levinson, “Suppressing the Expression of Community Values in Juries: How ‘Legal Priming’ Systematically Alters the Way People Think,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 73 (2005): 1063.
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© 2013 Kenneth A. Manaster
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Manaster, K.A. (2013). The Citizen as Juror. In: The American Legal System and Civic Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342331_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342331_5
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