My opinion? Folks are getting more and more risk-adverse and settling or mediating are surer ways to get the results you are satisfied with.
Jury Trial Is an Endangered Species
Posted by Peter Lattman
Law Blog
The American jury system is dying. It is dying faster in the federal courts than in the state courts. It is dying faster on the civil side than on the criminal, but it is dying nonetheless.
—Judge William Young, U.S. District Court for the District ofMassachusetts, March 6, 2004
The American jury system is dying. It is dying faster in the federal courts than in the state courts. It is dying faster on the civil side than on the criminal, but it is dying nonetheless.
—Judge William Young, U.S. District Court for the District ofMassachusetts, March 6, 2004
That’s the epigraph of an essay in the American Interest by Neal Ellis, a lawyer at Hunton & Williams in Raleigh. Ellis thinks our legal culture has come to view trying cases as a failure of the judicial system rather than as its cornerstone. Here’s the evidence: Fewer than 2% of civil cases went to trial in 2002, down from 11% 40 years earlier.
While he praises alternative dispute resolution like mediation, he raises concerns over several reasons why jury trials are dwindling. Among them: Rising litigation costs deter potential plaintiffs and encourage the settlement of even negligible claims. Also: The growing fear — which Ellis says is unfounded — that jurors are too unsophisticated and too easily swayed by emotion to render fair verdicts in increasingly complex cases.
Among his suggestions for filling up more jury boxes: capping lawyers’ fees on cases and restricting lawyers’ ability to question potential jurors, which in his view would deepen the jury pool. Without reform, he warns, Americans’ confidence in the judicial system, including the Constitution’s right to a trial by jury, will be dangerously undermined.
