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

The Scottish Criminal Jury: a Very Peculiar Institution

One of the benefits of the comparative study of legal institutions is that it exposes the extent to which they are shaped by contingency as well as by logic or principle. What is regarded in one jurisdiction as the only possible or acceptable way of doing something is often revealed to be pure preconception. In other words, the comparative study of law can act as a balance to the unconscious et...

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...

Verdicts Matter: An Empirical Study of California Employment Discrimination and Wrongful Discharge Jury Verdicts Reveals Low Success Rates for Women and Minorities

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...

Rhinology and medical malpractice: An update of the medicolegal landscape of the last ten years.

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Malpractice claims pertaining to rhinological procedures are a potentially important source of information that could be used to minimize the risk of future litigation and improve patient care. STUDY DESIGN A retrospective review of a publicly available database containing jury verdicts and settlements. METHODS The LexisNexis Jury Verdicts and Settlements database was ...