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The jury, alive and well: three decades of study by two of the country's leading jury researchers have revealed a thriving jury system. Here's an inside look at what they're found.

Article Excerpt
Although the right to a jury trial has been a cornerstone of American democracy, tort "reformers" and others have derided civil juries as being irrational, unreliable, and biased against businesses and corporations.

Such attacks are unfounded, according to NEIL VIDMAR of Duke University School of Law and VALERIE HANS of Cornell University Law School. These longtime students of the jury system have examined it with empirical scrutiny and reached the conclusion that American jurors are, for the most part, doing an excellent job.

In their recently published book, American Juries: The Verdict (Prometheus Books 2007), Vidmar and Hans--who trained as social scientists and hold doctorates in social psychology--have analyzed what juries do and what research tells us about juries' performance. They draw on their own studies and review and assess the work of other researchers, seeking to resolve such diverse questions as how successfully voir dire reveals juror biases and whether juries are competent to evaluate expert testimony in complicated medical malpractice or products liability cases.

In this interview with TRIAL Associate Editor SUSAN HEYLMAN, Vidmar and Hans discuss some of their findings on the state of the American jury.

TRIAL: You've been researching juries for more than three decades. What changes in juries have been the most significant during that time?

Hans: I would say the dramatic increase in the representativeness of juries is one of the most striking changes. When we began doing work in the early 1970s, juries were really quite different. They were mostly men and they were mostly white--they did not represent a broad swath of the public.

Technology has made it easier to get a cross-section of the population. In earlier days, jury commissioners would hand-pick individuals they thought would be good jurors. There was a natural tendency to select people they knew or to go with existing groups like the Elks Club, for example, whose members might be willing to be enlisted into jury service.

But in the intervening years, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a series of cases that required juries to be drawn from representative cross-sections of the community. That new legal landscape, combined with advances in computer technology used to select juries from voters' and other lists, facilitated moving beyond those small groups of people to a broader range of the population.

TRIAL: You note in your book that limited voir dire is ineffective and that lawyers can't easily detect biases and prejudices. How can the jury selection process be improved?

Hans: One of the recommendations we make is to expand voir dire to give lawyers a chance to ask questions of jurors first and then give jurors an opportunity to speak in their own words about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings about the case that they are being asked to decide.

Vidmar: It is essential that jurors be assessed in some way for their attitudes. Too often judges simply say, "Do you have any bias in this case?" Research has shown that by asking more open-ended questions, you get more information...

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