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)

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