| Abstract: | Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common thatit is widely accepted that the U.S. jury system needs to be'fixed'. Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increasejudicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judgesdecide cases differently than juries. We show that there arelarge differences in mean awards and win rates across juriesand judges. But if the types of cases coming before juries aredifferent from those coming before judges, mean award and winrates may differ even if judges and juries would make the samedecisions when faced with the same cases. We find that mostof the difference in judge and jury mean awards can be explainedby differences in the sample of cases coming before judges andjuries. On some dimensions, however, there remain robust andsuggestive differences between judges and juries. |
