Being Good Jurors: Invoking the Law as a Resource in Jury Deliberations

• In Event: 082 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session I
  In Refereed Roundtable: A. Table 11. Ethnomethodology

Abstract

The jury room is a natural setting to analyze how “rules” are applied by interactants as a resource in conversation, understood and oriented to by those individuals, and subsequently responded to by others. The court provides explicit deliberative “rules” in the form of legal instructions containing codified law, to which past research has shown jurors perceive their decision-making process as accountable. Through analysis of rare video from an actual jury deliberation, I find that legal rules are unique among possible conversational accounts for positions because all jurors have equal epistemic rights to invoke and directly contest such assertions. As “good jurors” believe that the only legitimate bases for their verdict are legal rationales (Garfinkel 1967), jurors perform interactional work to elicit these accounts from colleagues who articulate perceived illegitimate rationales and thus, are able to orient to their deliberation ending as conforming to legal rules.

Author

• Matthew Peter Fox, University of California-Los Angeles