Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
Judgment Day
By James Traub
A Trial by Jury
by D. Graham Burnett
Knopf, 183 pp., $21.00
A Cold Case
by Philip Gourevitch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 184 pp., $22.00
Jury service is one of the most common of all the burdens of citizenship (unless you consider voting a burden); and yet we have very few accounts of how juries actually work. In 1955, the University of Chicago Jury Project began to record jury deliberations surreptitiously (with the consent of judges); word of this unorthodox research method leaked out, and in the subsequent furor Congress and many states banned the recording of jury discussions. Later studies, including The American Jury (1966), a book based on the Chicago project by Harry Kalven Jr. and Hans Zeisel, have relied on reconstructions of what happened in the jury room or on mock trials.[1]
Review, 3634 words
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