Quilt Judges and Juries: Hard Questions

Runaway Judges? Selection Effects and the Jury

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the US jury system needs to be ‘fixed.’ Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show that there are large differences in mean awards and win rates across juries and judges. But if the type...

Punitive Damages: How Judges and Juries Perform

A substantial recent literature has documented the inability of jurors to make sound decisions with respect to punitive damages, particularly for health, safety, and environmental torts. Included in this literature are experimental studies documenting the better performance of judges than jurors for the same case scenarios. Recent research by Eisenberg et al. (2002) has suggested, however, that...

Symposium: Modeling Human Decisionmaking in the Law the Neurobiology of Opinions: Can Judges and Juries Be Impartial?

In this Article we build on neuroscience evidence to model belief formation and study decisionmaking by judges and juries. We show that physiological constraints generate posterior beliefs with properties that are qualitatively different from traditional Bayesian theory. In particular, decisionmakers will tend to reinforce their prior beliefs and to hold posteriors influenced by their preferenc...

The neurobiology of opinions : can judges and juries be impartial ? ∗

In this article we build on neuroscience evidence to model belief formation and study decision-making by judges and juries. We show that physiological constraints generate posterior beliefs with properties that are qualitatively different from traditional Bayesian theory. In particular, a decision-maker will tend to reinforce his prior beliefs and to hold posteriors influenced by his preference...

Judges, Juries, and Scientific Evidence