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Book abstract:
Why have so many cultures at different times and places used jurors to decide cases? Almost every society has professional judges. But from ancient Athens to medieval England to modern Asia, cultures have wanted ordinary persons involved. This book shows how and why societies around the world have used juries. The twelve-person jury spread from England to British colonies in America, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, and Africa. American revolutionaries celebrated jury nullification, and Americans established constitutional rights to jury trial. In criminal cases, use of lay jurors stretched beyond the English-speaking world to countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. These countries aspired to democracy, greater popular participation in government, and legitimacy of the justice system. South Korea in 2008 and Japan in 2009 are two of the most recent countries to adopt use of jurors. Renée Lettow Lerner is an expert guide, a law professor who is both a legal historian and a comparative law specialist. Using juries is challenging. Societies must determine how to select jurors, what cases jurors should decide and by what rules, and how to inform them about the law and evidence. Jury nullification continues. In English-speaking countries, jury trials are declining. Civil juries have been virtually abolished everywhere except the United States, and even there they are rare. Plea bargaining is taking the place of criminal jury trials. Innovations from non-English-speaking countries may hold the key to jurors’ survival. Along the way, the book tells how a small German state invented a way of using jurors that is now found around the world. And why some persons preferred to be crushed to death by weights rather than convicted by a jury.
On the author:
Renée Lettow Lerner is the Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. After graduating from Yale Law School, she was a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 2003 to 2005, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was a witness in a murder case in Paris, France, before a mixed panel of professional judges and lay jurors. Lerner is the author of History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009).
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