The Jury As Fact Finder And Community Presence In Civil Justice

With effective solutions in both criminal and civil disputes at a premium, reformers have advanced varied forms of jury systems as a means of fostering positive political, economic, and social change. Many countries have recently integrated lay partici

Annotation Are jury verdicts in business trials influenced less by a corporation's negligence than by sympathy for the plaintiffs, prejudice against business, and a belief in the corporation's "deep pockets"? Many members of the public and corporate executives believe that this is so, and they feel that the jury's decision making presents serious problems for American business competitiveness and its justice system. This book -- the first to provide a systematic account of how juries make decisions in typical business cases -- shows that these assumptions are false or exaggerated.Drawing on interviews with civil jurors, experiments with mock jurors, and public opinion polling, Valerie P. Hans explores how jurors determine whether businesses should be held responsible for an injury. She finds that many civil jurors, rather than being overly sympathetic to plaintiffs who bring civil lawsuits, are actually hostile to them, that there are only occasional instances of anti-business prejudice, and that there is no evidence of the deep-pockets hypothesis. Hans concludes that jurors do treat businesses differently than individuals, but this is because the public has higher expectations of corporations and more rigorous standards for their conduct.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation. Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

Some describe civil litigation as little more than a drag on the economy; Others hail it as the solution to most of the country’s problems. Stephen C. Yeazell argues that both positions are wrong. Deeply embedded in our political and economic systems, civil litigation is both a system for resolving disputes and a successful business model, a fact that both its opponents and its fans do their best to conceal. Lawsuits in a Market Economy explains how contemporary civil litigation in the United States works and how it has changed over the past century. The book corrects common misconceptions—some of which have proved remarkably durable even in the face of contrary evidence—and explores how our constitutional structure, an evolving economy, and developments in procedural rules and litigation financing systems have moved us from expecting that lawsuits end in trial and judgments to expecting that they will end in settlements. Yeazell argues that today’s system has in some ways overcome—albeit inconsistently—disparities between the rich and poor in access to civil justice. Once upon a time, might regularly triumphed over right. That is slightly less likely today—even though we continue to witness enormous disparities in wealth and power. The book concludes with an evaluation of recent changes and their possible consequences.