5/20/02, 1

Photo by Jim Ziv

Shari Diamond, the foremost empirical researcher on the jury process and legal decision-making, has been named to the Howard J. Trienens Chair at the Law School.

Diamond, who has a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D in social psychology from Northwestern, is also a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

She is conducting a pathbreaking research project that addresses a variety of questions about jury behavior during actual jury deliberations in the Arizona state courts.

The Arizona Jury Project grew out of the controversy surrounding the implementation of Rule 39 (f), a law that reforms jury decision-making. The Arizona law allows jurors to discuss evidence during breaks in the trial -- rather than only during jury deliberations, as is standard. Cameras were allowed to follow the jurors' conversations, providing the first opportunity to examine a sample of jury deliberations in 50 civil cases directly.

Forbidden topics, including discussion of insurance, which generally is banned by a rule of evidence, are the focus of the first article to come out of the research, "Jury Room Ruminations on Forbidden Topics"(Virginia Law Review Association, 2001).

The article concludes that talk about insurance occurred in 85 percent of the civil cases, even though it is legally irrelevant, and that the jurors' concern about insurance frequently was focused on the plaintiff, rather than on the defendant as traditional lore suggests. A more theoretically and empirically informed approach to instructing jurors on the law is described in the article.

In a report titled "Juror Discussions During Civil Trials: A Study of Arizona's Rule 39 (f) Innovation," Diamond and her colleagues take a look at how the controversial law is working and find evidence for some of the positive features and few of the negative characteristics predicted about the effects of the reform.

Diamond's other fields of interest include science and the courts, the regulation of trademarks and advertising and field research methodology.