Is There a Bias against Education in the Jury Selection Process
![handle is hein.journals/conlr38 and id is 335 raw text is: CONNECTICUT
LAW REVIEW
VOLUME 38 FEBRUARY 2006 NUMBER 3
Is There a Bias Against Education
in the Jury Selection Process?
HILLEL Y. LEVIN & JOHN W. EMERSON*
I. INTRODUCTION
Herbert Spencer famously said that a jury is a group of twelve people
of average ignorance.' That is not a particularly rosy picture of juror
competence, but it presents a far better view than the one held by many-if
not most-modem commentators. The more common contemporary sen-
timent was captured by Mark Twain when he wrote, in his inimitable style,
[w]e have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world;
and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve [peo-
ple] every day who don't know anything and can't read.,2 Specifically,
* Hillel Y. Levin graduated from Yale Law School in 2002, and subsequently clerked for Chief
Judge Robert N. Chatigny of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut and Senior
Judge Thomas Meskill of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He is currently an associate at the law
firm Robinson & Cole. John W. Emerson is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Yale University.
The authors would like to thank the judges and staff of the United States District Court for the District
of Connecticut for their assistance in facilitating this project. Without their permission and participa-
tion, this study would never have gotten off the ground. We especially owe a debt of gratitude to Chief
Judge Robert N. Chatigny. Additionally, we thank Professors Tom Baker, Shari Seidman Diamond,
Bill Eskridge, Jeremy Paul, and Kate Stith for their support, guidance, and helpful suggestions. Fi-
nally, we greatly appreciate the assistance of Jolanta Golanowska, our research assistant.
1 E.g., MORRIS J. BLOOMSTEIN, VERDICT: THE JURY SYSTEM 123 (1968); GLANViLLE WILLIAMs, THE
PROOF OF GUILT: A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH CRIMINAL TRIAL 207 (1955); Gail L. Heriot, A Study in the
Choice of Form: Statutes of Limitation and the Doctrine of Laches, 1992 BYU L. REV. 917, 947 n.88; Wil-
liam D. Stiehl, Insights into the Deliberative Process, 21 ST. LoUIS U. PUB. L. REV. 11, 12 (2002).
2 Mark Twain, Text of Undelivered Speech (July 4, 1872), reprinted in MARK TWAIN AND THE](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/conlr38&div=17&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Is There a Bias against Education in the Jury Selection Process
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