Jurors and Juries

The jury plays several important roles in the American legal system. Parties often turn to juries to resolve the hard cases, for which there are no clear answers, and the jury is supposed to apply its common-sense judgment to reach a verdict. The aspiration for today's jury is a jury drawn from a broad swath of the community, a jury that “looks like America.” One challenge that courts confronted beginning in the 1990s is whether jurors had the proper tools with which to perform their role. The traditional view of the juror was as a passive vessel. According to this view, jurors could sit quietly through the trial and remember all that was said and done. Judge Michael Dann, in a seminal article, took educational theory and applied it to jurors. One way to address the decline in the number of jury trials is to streamline the jury process.