Jury In Civil Cases Research Articles

The Abolition of the Right to Trial by Jury in Civil Cases in England

Abstract Prior to 1854, jury trial was the exclusive mode of resolving cases involving disputed facts at common law. By 1935, the civil jury trial had been virtually eliminated in all but a few obscure types of tort action. This article consists of a detailed examination, based primarily on legislative sources and contemporary legal periodicals, of how the right to trial by jury in civil cases was abolished. The first concrete step towards jury abolition occurred in 1854, when litigants in high court cases were empowered to waive their right to jury trial in favour of trial by judge alone. Thereafter, a series of legislative acts and judicial rules incrementally transferred the power to choose the mode of trial in particular types of cases from litigants to trial judges, who routinely chose trial by judge alone.

Challenges to Achieving Fairness in Civil Jury Selection

This paper identifies multiple challenges that courts face to achieving fairness in the selection of juries in civil cases. Achieving representative cross-sections of the community in jury venires, and ensuring that our civil juries reflect the community as well, are essential components contributing to the fairness and legitimacy of our civil justice system. Although legal rules and practices attempt to maximize fair and representative juries, the courts encounter substantial difficulty in achieving this important goal. Problems arise in summoning citizens for jury service, in questioning them during voir dire, and in exercising peremptory and for-cause challenges. Systematic empirical research on representativeness and new psychological studies on implicit and unconscious bias raise questions about the efficacy of current jury selection procedures. This paper identifies these problems and the challenges they present for producing representative and fair juries.

The Michigan Supreme Court Diminishes the Right to Trial by Jury in Civil Cases

In this paper, I have analyzed the right to trial by jury in civil cases as reflected in decisions of the Michigan Supreme Court over approximately a 20 year period dealing with three areas affecting the right to trial by jury in civil cases: (1) entitlement to a jury trial; (2) summary disposition; and (3) directed verdicts. The study was constructed to cover cases over a substantial period of time, so that it would be possible to analyze whether the changing composition of the Michigan Supreme Court, beginning in the late 1990's, impacted on the Court's decisions in these three areas.The conclusion that emerges from the is that the Court, as currently constituted, has diminished the right to trial by jury in civil cases in Michigan. The Court is more inclined than it was prior to 1999 to hold in more cases that there is no genuine issue of material fact, justifying summary disposition, and has now heard cases in which it has held that the defendant is entitled to a directed verdict. And the fact that the Court is more inclined to uphold the granting of summary disposition and directed verdicts is likely to have a demonstrable impact on these kinds cases when they are presented to the Court of Appeals and the trial courts. These courts, following the precedents of the Supreme Court and the results of the cases coming before that Court, will be more likely to rule in favor of granting motions for summary disposition and motions for directed verdicts.Given the Court's view of the diminished role of the jury in resolving factual disputes in civil cases, litigating lawyers must make the best of a bad situation and do everything that they can in order to protect the right to trial by jury in civil cases. They must try to ensure in the early stages of the litigation that their cases are strong enough to survive a motion for summary disposition and get to the jury, and at the trial they must make a determined effort to present sufficient evidence to survive a directed verdict. Hopefully the Court's view of the diminished role of the jury will not have dealt a fatal blow to the right to trial by jury in civil cases in Michigan. Time will tell how well the lawyers of Michigan have succeeded in preserving this fundamental constitutional right.

Back Door Arbitration: Why Allowing Nonsignatories to Unfairly Utilize Arbitration Clauses May Violate the Seventh Amendment

A brief look into the propriety of equitable estoppel in the arbitration context, considering the contractual principles of waiver and mutual asset and the Seventh Amendment's right to trial by jury in civil cases.

Law and Fact in Common Law Procedure

This paper examines some aspects of the boundary between law and fact in the common law. Part 1 looks at relevant procedural developments in English law from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. Part 2 discusses the contrasting views of Thayer and Holmes as to the roles of jury and judge in applying the law to the facts. Part 3 adverts to the consequences of the decline of the use of juries in civil cases in many jurisdictions.

Jury Demands and Trials

The behavior of juries in civil cases has been a focal concern in the legal reform debate. Whether a case would have a jury trial rather than a bench trial depends on decisions made by the parties to the legal dispute. In most civil litigation, either party may demand a jury trial, and this demand cannot be vetoed by the other party. This paper provides the first economic analysis of demand for jury trial and the implications of this choice on parties' settlement behavior. The empirical exploration of these issues uses a unique data set of almost 4,000 federal cases. The results are consistent with an economic model of the litigation process. Plaintiffs are more likely to demand trial by jury when juries are relatively more favorable to plaintiffs in similar cases, jury awards are more variable relative to bench awards, and the disparity in trial costs is smaller. Cases demanding jury trial are 5.5 percentage points more likely to settle without trial.

The Economic Origins of the Seventh Amendment

In deciding whether to empanel a jury in a particular case, federal courts are limited to applying an articulated by the Supreme Court. This test requires that courts look to the character of the plaintiff's cause of action and decide whether it is of a type that would have been tried in the common law courts in England in 1791. If so, the action is triable by a jury today. This article reviews the history surrounding the adoption of the Seventh Amendment to assert that the historical test is entirely without warrant in the historical record and is based on a fundamental misconception about the Amendment's purposes. There is no evidence that the framers of the Seventh Amendment intended to preserve for all time the right to jury trial as it existed in England in 1791 or even agreed on a substantive rule at all. To discern a substantive rule in the text of Seventh Amendment reference first must be made to the economic compromise contained in the first Judiciary Act. In framing the first Judiciary Act, Congress struck a compromise along economic lines, allowing juries to determine cases in which the national government was only indirectly concerned, while eliminating juries in cases that had a more direct impact on the nation's revenue and commerce. While imperfect in many ways, this trade-off addressed the strong federalists' desire to limit the law-finding function, while still allowing weaker federalists to acquiesce in the creation of an extensive system of lower federal courts. As a result, by the time James Madison brought forth his amendments to the Constitution in June 1789, the controversy over the right to trial by jury in civil cases had already been resolved. Although most antifederalists (and even some federalists) believed that some explicit protection for civil juries needed to be enshrined in the constitutional text, the diversity of state practice made agreement on any specific formula impossible. Relying on the compromise already reached in the judiciary bill, therefore, the first Congress merely recommended that the right to trial by jury be preserved. The most that could be said of the Amendment is that it was intended to ensure that the people would be adequately represented in all the branches of their government. It was also designed to commit the courts of the new Republic to respect the verdict of the jury in those cases in which juries were ultimately empaneled. It did not, however, attempt to define either the types of cases in which juries were required or the range of issues that must be put to them. In the end, then, the Seventh Amendment was the result of political calculation. It was designed to neutralize antifederalist complaints, while at the same time avoiding the need to say specifically what rights were actually to be enforced. Consequently, the Supreme Court's reliance on the historical test has actually become an unnecessary impediment to the implementation of the Seventh Amendment's jury trial guarantee.

Development of a theoretical criteria efectiveness index for the plaintiff lawyer when presenting evidence to juries in civil cases within the American legal system

Development of a theoretical criteria efectiveness index for the plaintiff lawyer when presenting evidence to juries in civil cases within the American legal system

A comparative analysis of linguistic complexity in two forms of jury charges

This study compared the linguistic complexity in the “federal standard instructions” with “Texas pattern special issues,” two modes for charging the jury in civil cases. The Texas pattern special issues were found to contain significantly fewer nominalizations, technical legal terms, and embeddings than the federal instructions. Implications of these findings on jury comprehension were discussed.

Special Interrogatories to Juries in Civil Cases

Special Interrogatories to Juries in Civil Cases