Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts A Global Perspective,

Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts A Global Perspective

  Edited by Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, Michigan State University

  Shari Seidman Diamond, The American Bar Foundation, Illinois 

  Valerie P. Hans Cornell University, New York,

and 

Nancy S. Marder, Chicago-Kent College of Law 

Although most countries around the world use professional judges, they also rely on lay citizens, untrained in the law, to decide criminal cases. The participation of lay citizens helps to incorporate community perspectives into legal outcomes and to provide greater legitimacy for the legal system and its verdicts. This book offers a comprehensive and comparative picture of how nations use lay people in legal decision-making. It provides a much-needed, in-depth analysis of the different approaches to citizen participation and considers why some countries’ use of lay participation is long-standing whereas other countries alter or abandon their efforts. This book examines the many ways in which countries around the world embrace, reject, or reform the way in which they use ordinary citizens in legal decisionmaking.

1. Introduction; Part I. Advancements in Lay Participation: 2. The Rise of the Jury in Argentina: Evolution in Real Time; 3. Twelve Years of Mixed Tribunals in Argentina; 4. Lay Participation in the Criminal Trial in Japan: A Decade of Activity and its Sociopolitical Consequences; 5. The Korean Jury System: The First Decade; 6. The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Spanish Jury; Part II. Enduring Systems of Lay Participation: 7. “… And My Right”: The Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales; 8.“In the Name of the People”: Lay Assessors in Germany; 9 The Jury in Canada: Testing the Comprehensibility of Styles of Jury Instructions and the Effectiveness of Aids; Part III. Challenges to Lay Participation in Law: 10. Dismissing the Jury: Mixed Courts and Lay Participation in Norway; 11. Trials by Peers: The Ebb and Flow of the Criminal Jury in France and Belgium; 12. The Russian Jury Trial: An Ongoing Legal and Political Experiment; 13. Trial by Jury in Georgia: A Catalyst for Evolving Independent Courts; Part IV. Global Perspectives on Lay Participation: 14. What Hollywood, USA, Teaches the World (Incorrectly and Correctly) about Juries; 15. The Case for a Hybrid Jury in Europe; 16. A Worldwide Perspective on Lay Participation