In the United States, jurors serve as the fact-finders for the civil and criminal justice systems and are tasked with making important decisions that impact society (e.g., verdicts and sentences in criminal cases and damages in civil cases). This chapter discusses current models and theories of juror decision-making to frame and provide a foundation for addressing how various types of legal evidence and nonlegal factors affect juror decision-making, including emotional evidence (e.g., victim impact statements and gruesome pictures and videos) and scientific evidence (e.g., DNA, shoe print, and fingerprint evidence). The chapter also examines how “nonevidentiary” extralegal factors, such as characteristics of the trial participants (e.g., age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, and other sociodemographics factors), are incorporated by jurors and influence their evaluation of evidence and decisions during trial. This chapter concludes with proposing various avenues for future research and a discussion of the policy implications of the work reviewed.

How does a group of strangers, many of whom are initially unhappy about serving as jurors, become a jury that works together as a group to reach a unanimous verdict based on the evidence that was presented to them during the trial and who leave their experience satisfied with the job they have done and with the jury system? The answer lies in the jury process and the way in which it transforms citizens into jurors. The various stages of the jury process, including the summons, voir dire, instructions, and deliberations, help citizens to step into their role as jurors. The final stage, the post-verdict interview with the judge, helps jurors to leave their role as jurors behind and to resume their lives as private citizens who will serve as emissaries for the jury. Although the jury process carries out this transformation of citizens into jurors reasonably well, there is still room for improvement. Each of the stages of the jury process can be improved upon by looking at the process as a whole rather than each stage in isolation, and by ensuring that any reforms further the transformation of citizens into jurors.

Collective agents play a critical role in the legal determination of facts. The jury continues to be the primary fact-finding institution in many legal cultures, and multi-member courts are also entrusted, in some legal systems, with the task of determining the facts at trial. Notwithstanding the relevance of group decision-making in evidential reasoning in law, legal epistemology for the most part embraces a highly individualistic perspective. A focus on the individual processes of legal decision-making is also a characteristic of attempts to address problems of legal epistemology by using the virtue theory framework. In this chapter, my aim is to contribute to the study of the social dimensions of deliberation about factual issues in law. More specifically, I will examine the relevance of group deliberative virtues, i.e., the character traits that enable sound group deliberation, to the epistemology of legal proof.

This chapter argues that contemporary debates about the constitution and expansion of mixed courts in Norway reveal a tension in attitudes toward lay participation in the legal system. On the one hand, lawyers and laypersons in Norway evince confidence that professional legal actors can effectively collaborate with jurors to reach verdicts. On the other hand, both laypersons and attorneys worry that when it comes to the prosecution of some crimes – particularly sex crimes – laypersons cannot be relied upon to do justice. After offering an overview of Norway’s shifting jury system, the chapter argues that judicial interventions in the jury system have contributed to its gradual loss of legitimacy. Drawing on empirical research, I argue that critiques of rape prosecutions have both amplified and sharpened the stakes of critiques of lay participation more broadly, though – at least for the moment – mixed courts of lay and professional judges are perceived to remedy the shortcomings of all-layperson juries.

Chapter four turns to the staging of justice, analyzing the design and setup of the post-reform court, the presentation of the monarchy and the principles of modesty and equality in the courtroom, the representation of minorities, and the effects of legal procedures on those present in court. An emphasis is put on the pedagogical message communicated by court performances, a message designed to turn the participants into “morally sound,” law-abiding citizens.

This chapter questions whether FitzNigel’s account of negotiated agreements is a credible description of the situation of peasants vis-à-vis their lords. It does so by looking at estate policies. Pre-Conquest surveys show categories of people whose livelihood depended on their working on a landowner’s inland and whose forebears and descendants were similarly dependent. Twelfth-century surveys show landowners beginning to require a record of what they could expect from named individuals among the rest of the peasantry. These documents were frequently headed by the names of jurors who had sworn to their veracity so obligations were now legalised. The detail in which they were recorded show that ‘custom’ was not what had been the case ‘from time immemorial’, but what had been negotiated and agreed to be owed from what was now a ‘tenement’.