It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

Paper Title

-- By MichaelBerkovits - 10 Feb 2008

Section I

Subsection A

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Subsection B

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Section II

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Initial Notes:

Eben touched on a number of quirks of the jury system and of the trial process.

1) Lawyers pay inordinate amounts to "jury consultants" in a magical ritual seeking control (and a predetermined outcome) to an inordinately complex social process.

• But just because jury consultation right now falls laughably short of a "science," does not mean that better jury consultants could not actually create a more sophisticated science of jury-picking that would actually come with reliable, statistical margins of error (e.g., in this type of case, choosing jurors of this type yields a verdict of "not guilty" with 80% confidence).

2) Right now, trials are sometimes "ordeals" where the verdict is not determined by actual guilt or innocence (or liability or nonliability), but rather by a quirk of fate in the form of the net wealth of the defendant.

• This bumps up against point 1, above. One of the ways wealth is supposed to matter is in the ability to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at expert jury consultants. But if consultants don't really affect the outcome of a trial, then at least one of the ways wealth is supposed to affect trial outcomes is non-existent. Of course, there would still be many other ways wealth would play a role: more effective lawyering, expert testifiers, etc.

Here are some other things that have always struck me about the jury and trial system. 3) Peremptory strikes -

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