The University Press of Kansas has released
The Jury in America: Triumph and Decline (Feb. 2016), by
Dennis Hale (Boston College). A description from the Press:
The jury trial is one of the formative elements of American
government, vitally important even when Americans were still colonial
subjects of Great Britain. When the founding generation enshrined the
jury in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were not inventing
something new, but protecting something old: one of the traditional and
essential rights of all free men. Judgment by an “impartial jury” would
henceforth put citizen panels at the very heart of the American legal
order. And yet at the dawn of the 21st century, juries resolve just two
percent of the nations legal cases and critics warn that the jury is
“vanishing” from both the criminal and civil courts. The jurys critics
point to sensational jury trials like those in the O. J. Simpson and Menendez
cases, and conclude that the disappearance of the jury is no great
loss. The jury’s defenders, from journeyman trial lawyers to members of
the Supreme Court, take a different view, warning that the
disappearance of the jury trial would be a profound loss.
In The Jury in America,
a work that deftly combines legal history, political analysis, and
storytelling, Dennis Hale takes us to the very heart of this debate to
show us what the American jury system was, what it has become, and what
the changes in the jury system tell us about our common political and
civic life. Because the jury is so old, continuously present in the life
of the American republic, it can act as a mirror, reflecting the
changes going on around it. And yet because the jury is embedded in the
Constitution, it has held on to its original shape more stubbornly than
almost any other element in the American regime. Looking back to juries
at the time of America’s founding, and forward to the fraught and
diminished juries of our day, Hale traces a transformation in our
understanding of ideas about sedition, race relations, negligence,
expertise, the responsibilities of citizenship, and what it means to be a
citizen who is “good and true” and therefore suited to the difficult
tasks of judgment.
Criminal and civil trials and the jury decisions that result from them
involve the most fundamental questions of right, and so go to the core
of what makes the nation what it is. In this light, in conclusion, Hale
considers four controversial modern trials for what they can tell us
about what a jury is, and about the fate of republican government in
America today.
A blurb:
“Dennis Hale brings the broad vision of a gifted political theorist
to assess the significance of the jury in American life, both its past
centrality and its more recent marginalization. This important book
provides an acute, detailed, and balanced judgment on all the central
issues.” —Robert P. Burns
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