The Imagined Juror: How Hypothetical Juries Influence Federal Prosecutors
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
3-2024
ISSN
1062-7421
Publisher
APSA Law and Courts Section
Language
en-US
Abstract
The right to a jury is enshrined in the United States Constitution, but these days juries are famously hard to find. A tiny fraction of lawsuits, whether civil or criminal, involve an actual jury (p. 28). Yet the idea of the jury continues to influence how lawsuits—even those that never get to a jury—proceed. Some of that influence is structural. For instance, a party seeking summary judgment in a civil lawsuit appeals to the abstract notion of a hypothetical jury: if a judge decides that no reasonable jury could find for the party’s adversary, there’s no point empaneling a jury at all. In that situation, the importance of the non-existent jury is, in some sense, written into legal standards, visible for all to see. But Anna Offit’s fascinating new study reveals that the idea of the jury plays an even more pervasive, less visible, role.
Recommended Citation
Anya Bernstein,
The Imagined Juror: How Hypothetical Juries Influence Federal Prosecutors
,
34
Law and Politics Book Review
12
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/shorter_works/315
