Jury Size and Composition: An Economic Approach

The facilities and processes that governments provide for resolving legal disputes constitute an important public service. For the resolution of some of these disputes, society turns to a body of laymen—a jury. In considering the fury as a conflict-resolving instrument, several interrelated questions arise concerning the jury’s size, the way its members are selected, and the voting rule that it uses in reaching its decision. This paper presents a theoretical structure to help address these questions. The model, which uses a statistical decision-theoretic framework, is then used to examine the specific issue of how ‘representative’ a jury should be.