Legal News

Doh! Professor?s Article on Jury Service Leads to An Overturned Verdict

By Ashby Jones

A little Law Blog lesson to lawyers and law professors: If you do get chosen to serve on a jury, try to keep from from explaining legal concepts to the other jury members. That’s frowned upon. But if you just can’t help it, and, during deliberations, you find yourself, say, lecturing on how the law of contributory negligence has developed since the middle ages, don’t write about your harangue in a newspaper later on.

The lessons are neatly outlined in a ruling made on Thursday in a New Jersey case, in which a law professor's article on his experiences as a juror in a slip-and-fall case resulted in a new trial for a grocery store found liable for $876,000. Click here for the ruling; here for the ABA Journal’s writeup of the ruling.

A New Jersey appeals court ruled on Thursday that the defendant deserved a new trial, in part because the legal explanations given during jury deliberations by Robert Martin (pictured), a law professor at Seton Hall, had a tendency to influence the verdict.

The influence issue came to light after Martin wrote a December 2006 article for the New Jersey Law Journal reflecting on his experiences as foreman of the jury. In the article, Martin wrote that other jurors were relying on him to deal with abstract legal concepts. "For example, I was asked to clarify what the judge meant by 'proximate cause' and its significance in proving a negligence claim," Martin wrote. "I do think my familiarity with the law proved helpful to fellow jurors. . . . I am convinced that in our case my opinions swayed other jurors and were extremely influential in the final outcome."

A trial court concluded after a hearing examining Martin's influence that the professor overstated his impact on the other jurors and he had no special role in deliberations. But the appeals court reversed, noting that the professor proposed the amount of damages ultimately awarded by the jury. "It is not the role of the foreperson to explain legal concepts to the other jurors," the court said.

A call to Martin was not immediately returned.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 20, 2009 (boomark / email).