Deliberative Democracy and the American Civil Jury

Abstract

Civil jury service should be a potent form of deliberative democracy, creating greater civic engagement. However, a 2010 seven‐state study of jury service and voting records found no overall boost in civic engagement following service on civil juries, whereas jurors who served on criminal cases did show increased civic engagement following their jury service. This article reports a project that augments the civil jury data set with information about jury decision rule, jury size, defendant identity, and case type and examines whether specific types of civil jury service influence postservice voting. Taking into account preservice voting records, jurors who serve on a civil jury that is required to reach unanimity or a civil jury of 12 are significantly more likely to vote after their service. Jurors who decide cases with organizational, as opposed to individual, defendants likewise show a boost in voting behavior, as do jurors deciding contract or nonautomotive torts cases compared to automotive torts. Limitations and implications of these findings for deliberative democracy theory and jury practice are discussed.

Trial by Jury: Story of a Legal Transplant

“…Public trials with lay fact finders demand greater transparency and clearer presentation of law and evidence. Participation as a lay decision maker, whether as a juror or a lay judge, appears to produce greater civic engagement (Gastil et al ; Hans, Gastil, and Feller, ; Porterie, Bordagaray, and Sayago ), and increased support for the judiciary and the legal system. Research that explores in more detail how features of these different systems affect not only fact finding but also these broader societal effects will deepen our knowledge of the multiple influences created by lay participation in the legal system.…”

Motivating Cooperation and Compliance with Authority

“…21 However, the direction and strength of the relationship between being a juror and trust in the courts are complex. Jury service, on balance, is associated with greater trust in the jury system, trial courts, and even the US Supreme Court (Gastil et al, 2010 ;Hans, Gatsil, & Feller, 2014 ). But the strength of that direct link is modest.…”

“…Further analysis of civil trials found additional details that can explain why some civil jurors have increased rates of civic engagement (Hans et al, 2014 ). Through secondary analysis of the original data augmented by detailed information on the context of the trial (e.g., jury size, decision rule, decision standard), some of the inherent differences between civil as opposed to criminal trials were identifi ed (e.g., whether the juror was deciding a case based on a preponderance of the evidence and whether a majority verdicts was allowed).…”

Inferring models of opinion dynamics from aggregated jury data

“…In this paper, we model jury datasets for civil trials in Oregon (OR) [42] and California (CA) [46]. We find qualitatively similar behavior in the Washington (WA) and Nebraska (NE) datasets whose data is less complete [47, 48]. Namely, the WA and NE data shows the deliberation time scaling behavior 〈 T delib 〉∼( T trial ) 1/2 (Fig 1b) but also the left-skewed deliberation time distribution (Fig 1d).…”