Opening remarks.

• Author: Amar, Akhil Reed
• Position: The Civil Jury as a Political Institution

DEAN DOUGLAS: Our next speaker is Akhil Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University.

As it happens, Professor Amar was a Yale College classmate of Senator Whitehouse and then graduated a few years later from Yale Law School where he was my friendly classmate. After serving as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Breyer, Professor Amar returned to Yale to join the Law School faculty in 1985. Professor Amar is one of the most influential constitutional theorists in the United States. The Supreme Court has invoked his work in the course of its decision making on more than twenty instances. He is the author of several leading books on the American Constitution, including The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, America's Constitution: A Biography, and most recently a book that I will recommend particularly for students in the room today, but for everyone: America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By.

Professor Amar.

(Applause)

PROFESSOR AMAR: It is a very great pleasure and honor to be here with you all back at William and Mary. It's a special treat to follow Senator Whitehouse--also a challenge, given his extraordinary performance. Dean Douglas, it's always great to see you again, and also a special thanks to Neal Devins for helping to make this possible. I guess I can't help saying one other thing. As I walked into this building, and I noticed the statue of George Wythe, teacher, known by, among other things, his extraordinary students: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Henry Clay. Did I mention James Monroe? There are others. And as I look out in the audience and survey the schedule, I can't help notice that I, too, have been blessed over the years with extraordinary students, two of whom you will be hearing from over the course of this event. So I love the idea of a law school named for a teacher, celebrating a teacher, and a teacher in part known for his students. So thank you so much for inviting me back here.

At an event designed to encourage thought and discussion about the jury--the civil jury, as a political institution--I would like us to remember that the civil jury is a part of a larger jury family, a family of political institutions. So what I'm going to talk about today is what lessons we might learn if we think about the jury family.

Senator Whitehouse said blank jury, and he mentioned that some people put in runaway. Well, the idea of blank jury, we talk about civil jury, grand jury, criminal petit jury. There are a family of juries. Now, once you start to think about the family of jury trials, some of the history lesson that he has given to you is specific and unique to the civil jury. Some of those quotations from history revolve around juries more generally. So what might the civil jury have to learn from grand juries and criminal petit juries once we understand the jury family?

Here are a couple of thoughts. One, the grand jury is a sitting body. Here it's not as ad hoc as a civil jury, in which basically each one is summoned into existence for a specific case, and that's not true of a grand jury. A grand jury convenes and hears a variety of matters during the course of its tenure. And is it possible that the civil jury had been at a disadvantage to some extent because of its ad hoc quality? Earlier Senator Whitehouse and I were just briefly talking about the similarities and differences between the House and the Senate. And, of course, once one understands that juries are structured as a branch of the judiciary--that is, the lower house of a bicameral judiciary, judge and jury--the analogy of House and Senate becomes not an outlandish one. And the House is--has less continuity to it. Every two years one House dies. The Senate is a more continuing body, and in that continuity, I think, it has certain advantages over the House. And in the same way, is it possible that the civil jury...