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Which criteria do Russians use to evaluate the fairness of their judges, and how does perceived fairness of actual trials influence general beliefs about Russian courts? Lay assessors at courts in South Russia were asked about their experience serving on mixed courts. The justice of the verdicts rendered and the fairness of judges partly explain the respondents' view of national courts. According to the results, the respondents are also using similar criteria for fairness as Americans or Germans. The social and psychological group effects in a Russian court of lay assessors exhibit a striking similarity to other Western tribunals. * The author thanks Dmitrij Donskow for his inestimable help in preparing and conducting the survey. Olga Litvinova assisted in translating the questionnaire and research literature. Vice-President of the Oblast Court of Rostow at the Don Wladimir Solotych made the survey possible by a support letter to the local courts. Sergey Potseluev was our contact person at the State University of Rostow at the Don. Steven Thaman, Alexei Trochev, and Ilja Alexandrov provided helpful information. Klaus F. Röhl provided the infrastructure of his chair in Bochum for the finishing phase of the project. Valerie Hans gave a lot of comments and suggestions to this article.

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The courtroom drama is a prominent film genre. Most of the movies in this category are Hollywood productions, dealing with the legal system in the United States of America. What they have in common is that essential parts of their stories take place in court. These movies have a tremendous influence on the public's concept of justice even though very few of them accurately reflect legal reality. Anyone with legal training who watches films of this sort will notice in them all sorts of absurdities 1 which are not thoroughly investigated in this paper. Our concern here is to inquire why even movies that take place in continental Europe follow patterns of the American system and also why certain elements from American movies are repeated over and over again.

German administrative courts employ lay assessors who decide cases together with professional judges. The mixed court is comprised of three professional judges and two lay assessors and decisions require a simple majority. This article compares the experience of East and West German lay assessors using samples from two provinces. The two groups did not differ substantially in their self‐reported participation during deliberations. Issues of distributive and procedural fairness are crucial for the way lay assessors experience their work. Lay assessors disagree with professional judges more often when their sense of justice is at issue. Lay assessors are most successful when the professional judges treat them as equal partners. Female lay assessors participated less frequently than males but this was not an effect of gender distribution in the tribunal. Differences in formal education did not help explain deliberation activity. Respondents with “high” power‐distance orientation (social distance between those in power and those who are to obey) less often disagreed with professional judges. This high orientation is more frequent in the East. In addition to these specific factors, the institutional setting is a most important factor affecting the experience of the lay assessors.