Professor’s Solution: Limit Use of Juries

Not everyone agrees civil jury trials are worthwhile.

Yale law professor George Priest, for one, says most of the time they are not and there should be a constitutional amendment to limit them.

In a study of Chicago courts, perennially among the nation’s most heavily backlogged, Priest found that only 800 of the 70,000 pending civil cases go to jury trial each year. Five-year waits to go to trial are common.

Yet the prospect of eventually being able to go to a jury trial--and maybe win big--is tempting. That leads to delays in settling cases.

Chicago has put reforms into practice year after year in response to critical congestion problems, Priest said. These have included using judges rather than lawyers to question potential jurors, and using impartial medical experts rather than doctors hired by each side. But the reforms have not worked. As congestion eased temporarily, more litigants chose to take advantage of shortened waits to go to trial. Their refusal to settle simply created new logjams.

Researchers have for years compared the way cases flow into a court calendar to the way logs heading for a lumber mill float into a lake. “The determinants of the size of the logjam at any point are the rate that logs flow into the lake, the rate that logs flow out of the lake and the number of logs stuck in the lake from earlier imbalances in the flow,” Priest said. “Plucking logs off the lake increases the rate that logs flow into the lake.”

He said the answer to overcrowding in the nation’s civil courts--a fact of life lamented by lawyers and litigants for more than 20 years--is to restrict access to civil juries. Only those litigants who really need lay people to decide their cases should have civil juries.

He suggested that civil juries be reserved for people suing the government for violating their rights, for people claiming they have been defamed and for people who have been injured in an uncommon and devastating way.

“But if you add all of those types of cases up, you come to something less than 5% of the cases civil juries handle,” Priest said.

Civil juries spend two-thirds of their time on “routine auto collision cases. . . . Twenty percent of the time they’re evaluating broken legs,” he said.

Using judges to decide routine cases would ease delays, Priest suggested, because judges’ decisions would be more predictable than those of juries. Litigants would know the likely outcome of a trial and be more inclined to negotiate settlements.

“When you see that the jury is spending most of its time on routine cases, and when it is the jury that’s generating the delay (in the system) then it seems to me you really have to question whether the civil jury . . . is worth the delay that it’s generating,” Priest said.