The Effect of Jury Experience on Jury Verdicts

Estimating the Accuracy of Jury Verdicts

Average accuracy of jury verdicts for a set of cases can be studied empirically and systematically even when the correct verdict cannot be known. The key is to obtain a second rating of the verdict, for example, the judge’s, as in the recent study of criminal cases in the United States by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). That study, like the famous Kalven-Zeisel study, showed only m...

Forty Years of Civil Jury Verdicts

Debate over civil justice reform in the United States frequently centers on the extent to which damage awards granted by juries have been escalating over time. However, past studies on civil juries have been hampered by lack of data on verdicts spanning a sufficiently long time period. Average jury awards tend to be highly variable from year to year, making it difficult to distinguish trends ov...

Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts

It is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that unanimity rule may lead to high probabilities of both kinds of errors and that th...

Cardinal Newman and Jury Verdicts: Reason, Belief, and Certitude

Improving the Jury System: Reducing Jury Size

Within the last several years there has been increasing concern over the rising costs of California's legal system. Many within and outside of the legal community have focused their attention on the issues of caseload volume, delay and congestion within California courts as a result of the rising number of civil and criminal cases. These mounting concerns have spawned a growing movement for cou...