The courts, legal practitioners, scholars, and social scientists have longrecognized that judges' behavior, both verbal and nonverbal, may have importanteffects on trial processes and outcomes. For example, appellatecourts have cautioned repeatedly that juries in criminal trials accord even themost subtle behaviors of the judge great weight and deference. One judgeconcluded that juries "can be ...

This Article uses unique data from over 300 criminal trials in four large counties to study the relations between the existence of a prior criminal record and defendants testifying at trial, between defendants testifying at trial and juries’ learning about criminal records, and between juries’ learning about criminal records and their decisions to convict or acquit. Sixty percent of defendants ...

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...

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...

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the functional equivalence of different sized juries (at least in the range of 6- to 12-person groups). Several formal models of jury decision making predict that larger juries should hang more often, particularly for very close cases. Failures to confirm this prediction in several previous studies were attributed to inadequate sample sizes or to in...

We analyze the extent and consequences of unequal representation on juries in Harris County, Texas. first document that residents from predominantly White high-income neighborhoods are substantially overrepresented juries. Using quasirandom variation those called for jury duty each day, we next establish Black defendants more likely to be convicted receive longer sentences with these neighborho...