Although most countries around the world use professional judges, they also rely on lay citizens, untrained in the law, to decide criminal cases. The participation of lay citizens helps to incorporate community perspectives into legal outcomes and to provide greater legitimacy for the legal system and its verdicts. This book offers a comprehensive and comparative picture of how nations use lay people in legal decision-making. It provides a much-needed, in-depth analysis of the different approaches to citizen participation and considers why some countries' use of lay participation is long-standing whereas other countries alter or abandon their efforts. This book examines the many ways in which countries around the world embrace, reject, or reform the way in which they use ordinary citizens in legal decision-making.

The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Process surveys the topics and issues in the field of criminal process, including the laws, institutions, and practices of the criminal justice administration. The process begins with arrests or with crime investigation such as searches for evidence. It continues through trial or some alternative form of adjudication such as plea bargaining that may lead to conviction and punishment, and it includes post-conviction events such as appeals and various procedures for addressing miscarriages of justice. Across more than 40 chapters, this Handbook provides a descriptive overview of the subject sufficient to serve as a durable reference source, and more importantly to offer contemporary critical or analytical perspectives on those subjects by leading scholars in the field. Topics covered include history, procedure, investigation, prosecution, evidence, adjudication, and appeal.

Offers a comprehensive and comparative picture of how countries around the globe use ordinary citizens to decide criminal cases.

This monumental and comprehensive volume reviews more than 50 years of empirical research on civil and criminal juries and returns a verdict that strongly supports the jury system.

In this timely volume, the authors provide a penetrating analysis of the institutional mechanisms perpetuating the related problems of minorities' disenfranchisement and their underrepresentation on juries.

This book gives a complete overview of America's jury system. It has three instructional goals: to show where the jury stands in America's rich legal history, to explain the defining features of today's jury, and to identify aspects of the jury where improvements can and should be made. It can be used as a primary textbook for a course, or as a supplement in any law school course that includes a unit on the jury.

Who Judges? is the first book to explain why different states design their new jury systems in markedly different ways.

This book presents a comprehensive account of past and present efforts to introduce the jury system in Japan. Four legal reforms are documented and assessed: the implementation of the bureaucratic and all-judge special jury systems in the 1870s, the introduction of the all-layperson jury in the late 1920s, the transplantation of the Anglo-American-style jury system to Okinawa under the U.S. Occupation, and the implementation of the mixed-court lay judge (saiban’in) system in 2009. While being primarily interested in the related case studies, the book also discusses the instances when the idea of introducing trial by jury was rejected at different times in Japan’s history. Why does legal reform happen? What are the determinants of success and failure of a reform effort? What are the prospects of the saiban’in system to function effectively in Japan? This book offers important insights on the questions that lie at the core of the law and society debate and are highly relevant for understanding contemporary Japan and its recent and distant past.