The Dissemination of Jury Trials: A Reading from Argentina
Published date | 01 September 2017 |
Date | 01 September 2017 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12282 |
Commentary on Valerie P. Hans’s Presidential Address
The Dissemination of Jury Trials: A Reading from
Argentina
Mar
ıa In
es Bergoglio
In 2008, Valerie Hans wrote an article that provided a research
agenda for jury scholars, highlighting the importance of compar-
ative work, to understand how citizen participation interacts with
the cultural, political, economic, and legal traditions in different
countries. She emphasized the importance of studying newly
emerging systems to observe whether legal consciousness and the
public legitimacy of the legal system are affected when citizens
participate as decision makers. This issue has been difficult to
study with stable existing systems (Hans 2008: 292).
Living in Cordoba, the Argentine province where lay partici-
pation had just started after a century and a half of constitutional
disobedience, I found her remarks especially inspiring for my
own work. The quick expansion of international research cooper-
ation, by means of CRNs and IRCs gave me the forum for a rich
exchange of research methodologies and findings with scholars
coming from many other recently democratized countries, like
Korea, Croatia, or Spain. Nevertheless, looking backwards I must
admit, as she does, that lessons have been learned about how lay
participation systems work in different countries but that compar-
ative information is still scarce.
Her presidential address is oriented to develop a comprehen-
sive account of the global dissemination of institutions of lay participa-
tion in law (Hans 2017: 2). In line with this goal, I would like to
reflect on the process of adoption of this institution in Argen-
tina, trying to understand how our long history of failed
attempts has finally resulted in a successful transplant. This
experience could be useful to clarify the conditions under which
a new legal institution is translated to the local legal culture
(Langer 2007), and to discuss the contribution of socio-legal
scholars to transplants.
Please direct all correspondence to Mar
ıa In
es Bergoglio, Facultad de Derecho, Univer-
sidad Nacional de C
ordoba, Echenique Altamira 3038, 5016 C
ordoba, Argentina; email:
mibergoglio@gmail.com.
Law & Society Review, Volume 51, Number 3 (2017)
V
C2017 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.
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