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48 DePaul L. Rev. 201 (1998-1999)
Some Notes on the Civil Jurty in Historical Perspective

handle is hein.journals/deplr48 and id is 211 raw text is: SOME NOTES ON THE CIVIL JURY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Lawrence M. Friedman* It is an interesting fact that there is no full scale history of the American jury. What there is-and the literature is not large-deals mostly with criminal cases. The criminal jury, after all, is much more in the public eye than the civil jury. Everybody sees trials on televi- sion and in the movies. Civil cases are, on the whole, pale and blood- less in comparison. As a consequence, when ordinary people think about the jury, they usually have the criminal jury in mind. This also seems to be true of some jury scholars. At least one recent, and rather good book, Jeffrey Abramson's We, the Jury, is subtitled The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy.' Although the title does not say so, the book is entirely about criminal juries.2 The same is true of the classic study, The American Jury, by Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel, published in 1966.3 At the time, Kalven and Zeisel also prom- ised a volume about the civil jury; but no such book ever appeared.4 Thus, the criminal jury gets the lion's share of the attention and the civil jury sits home among the ashes. It is most definitely unap- preciated. That word appears in one of the very rare studies of the history of the civil jury,5 Stephan Landsman's 1993 article, which is subtitled Scenes from an Unappreciated History.6 * Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor, Stanford University School of Law. 1. JEFFREY ABRAMSON, WE, THE JURY (1994). 2. Some of the scholarly studies, notably Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar's study, JUDGING THE JURY, contain material on the civil as well as the criminal jury. VALERIE P. HANS & NEIL VIDMAR, JUDGING THE JURY (1986). 3. HARRY KALVEN & HANS ZEISEL, THE AMERICAN JURY (1966). 4. For hints about what the study was finding or would have found or did find, see Harry Kalven, Jr., The Jury, the Law, and the Personal Injury Damage Award, 19 OHIo ST. L.J. 158 (1958). 5. With regard to English law, there is THOMAS ANDREW GREEN, VERDICT ACCORDING TO CONSCIENCE: PERSPECTIVES ON THE ENGLISH CRIMINAL TRIAL JURY, 1200-1800 (1985), on the history of the English criminal jury. As far as I know, there is no comparable history of the civil jury. 6. Stephan Landsman, The Civil Jury in America: Scenes from an Unappreciated History, 44 HASTINGS L.J. 579 (1993) [herinafter Landsman, Unappreciated History]; Stephan Landsman, The History and Objectives of the Civil Jury System, in VERDICT: ASSESSING THE CIVIL JURY SYSTEM 22 (Robert E. Litan ed., 1993).

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