The Jury as a Translation of Democratic Participation and Political Conflict

• Published date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12287
• Date: 01 September 2017

Commentary on Valerie P. Hans’s Presidential Address

The Jury as a Translation of Democratic

Participation and Political Conflict

Lee Demetrius Walker

In this response to Valerie Hans’s Presidential address, I use her “legal trans-

lating” term to argue that the implementation of liberal democratic structures

in new democracies opens new opportunities to translate the jury system into

and onto new democratic societies. While policy makers have concerns about

the strength and vibrancy of lay participation in the legal system, policy mak-

ers’ decisions to adopt trial by jury are not always democratic. Nonetheless,

the consequence of the translation of trial by jury furthers democratic devel-

opment. Using Nicaragua, Mexico, and Russia as case studies, I suggest that

one goal of policy makers who attempt to adopt trial by jury is to reduce the

discretionary power of judges who remain from the prior government. Com-

parative trial-by-jury research can contribute more to our understanding of

democratic development than prior research has indicated.

Along tradition in scholarship champions the juror as an

important manifestation of democratic participation. Some schol-

arship advances the jury as an expression of and method to instill

democratic duty and produce lay participation at the individual

level (Dalton 2008; Hans 2007; Fukurai, Knudtson, and Lopez

2009). Other scholarship views the jury as an institutional mani-

festation of deliberative democracy and as a method to facilitate

consensual democracy (Gastil et al. 2002; Smith and Wales 2000;

Hans, Gastil, and Feller 2014; Warren and Gastil 2015). Both

approaches view the jury as a mechanism to establish further

democracy through participation in democratizing societies. In

her presidential address, Valerie Hans offers the useful concept

of “legal translating” to understand further the adoption, expan-

sion and decline of trial by jury in established and developing

democracies. I use her deployment of this term to argue that the

implementation of liberal democratic structures in new democra-

cies opens new opportunities to translate the jury system into and

onto new democratic societies.

Please direct all correspondence to Lee Demetrius Walker, Department of PoliticalSci-

ence, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #305340, Denton, TX 76203; email:

Lee.Walker@unt.edu.

Law & Society Review, Volume 51, Number 3 (2017)

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