Legal Commentary

In case you missed it, here's an interesting story about Korea's new jury system -- and how citizens and the system are adapting to it.

I've written about  jury systems around the world in this recently published essay.  It appears that contrary to the information I had at the time of writing, Korea is asking jurors to produce unanimous verdicts (though since the jury verdicts are never binding for now -- even when unanimous -- it is hard to know what Korea will do about unanimity when and if they choose to keep the jury system as a permanent and/or mandatory feature of its criminal justice system).

For what it is worth, it looks like New Zealand is just now backing off unanimous verdicts (though NZ was excluded from my survey of big democracies because of its size).  That leaves only the US, Canada, and some jurisdictions in Australia keeping the unanimity rule in the criminal jury.  My defense of supermajoritarian conviction rules for the US is here.