Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs) play a vital role within the Law and Society Association’s broader intellectual communities. CRNs provide a platform for LSA members to connect, exchange ideas, and collaborate with other scholars who share common interests. Through these networks, members not only organize sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting but also develop cross-disciplinary and cross-national research projects. CRNs help build deeper intellectual and professional connections among scholars, helping build a stronger sense of community within LSA and encouraging meaningful research collaborations.
CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope.
For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 04: Lay Participation in Legal Systems.
In the United States, few things trigger mixed feelings more reliably than receiving a jury duty summons in the mail. Most citizens appreciate the importance of juries to democracy, and are intrigued about what to expect from the experience. However, the prospect of juggling this civic duty with the daily demands of career, health, and family life can be stressful. This, as well as the possibility of sitting in a jury box for days to weeks, listening to the potentially boring and/or distressing facts of a case before deliberating with a group of random strangers, is enough to give many people pause.
Thankfully, though, research indicates that many jury duty survivors come away with a positive view of their experience.
“Serving as a lay judge, or as a juror, really has an impact,” says Cornell Law School Professor Valerie Hans. “Most people who are selected and serve on a jury come out of it with positive views about their jury service, and in fact become more favorable toward the courts.”
To be sure, participating in the legal decision-making process as a citizen offers numerous potential benefits. Real-world courtroom experience can provide greater context for how and why decisions are made. Having a direct impact on an issue, no matter how small, can be empowering. And, most provocatively for 2025, working toward a common goal with people who have different beliefs and perspectives can have a unifying effect. It turns out that being compelled to step outside of one’s social comfort zone can promote greater understanding of fellow citizens, and society more generally.
“There’s been a couple of op–eds recently about people who served on a jury,” says University of Texas at Austin Professor Mary Rose. “Both of them have pointed out how powerful it was to be thrown in a room with people that you really would not associate with otherwise, especially today where we can segregate so easily. And to have to solve a problem together and work out differences and everything, it is a very unusual and empowering and democratic experience.”
No one understands the transformative power of collaboration better than lay participation scholars, who study juries, mixed courts, and other models of citizen participation in legal decision-making. Professor Hans and her research collaborator, Michigan State University Professor Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, decided to harness this power in 2001, when they created one of LSA’s first Collaborative Research Networks, CRN 4: Lay Participation in Legal Systems. Professor Rose, who now co-chairs CRN 4 with Professors Hans and Kutnjak Ivković, joined the group at the launch of its first organized meetings, which were part of the annual meeting in Budapest; she was delighted to have such an organized way to surround herself with scholars who had her same interests, but different specializations, disciplines, preferred methodologies, and cultural backgrounds.
“If you were to say someone is a jury scholar…the way Valerie and I came up, you would probably be talking primarily about a social psychologist and someone who was trained in, and maybe even privileges, the experimental methodology,” Professor Rose explains.
“It was exciting because before, the work by people who studied these different types of lay participation was quite scattered,” Professor Hans adds. “Law and Society might have a panel or two on some particular topic, like a jury panel. But there wasn’t any concerted effort to draw people together who studied the challenges, but also benefits, that come from having lay people participate in legal decision making.”
It’s easy to see why lay participation scholars have been so scattered. Many countries have adopted some form of legal participation for lay citizens, generally in the hopes of enhancing a legal system’s perceived legitimacy, reducing bias and judicial corruption, and infusing diverse perspectives and community values into the legal process. But no two lay participation systems are the same, informed as they are by each country’s unique political, legal, social, and cultural realities. A single scholar could spend an entire career focusing on just one aspect of lay participation, or on a single country’s approach. CRN 4 members, however, find that their own scholarship is enhanced when they learn from one another.
“It’s given me a better sense of the political nature of lay participation and what it means to people. Also the importance of context, including political context, social context, and legal context,” says Professor Hans. “A number of the other countries who are represented in our CRN…have a radically different legal tradition from the US. I mean, we have the common law tradition, and they have a civil law tradition.”
Common vs. civil law is one of the most foundational differences underpinning each country’s approach to lay participation. Generally speaking, common law countries that champion precedent, interpretation, and independence tend to use the jury system, while countries with a more “by-the-book” civil law tradition often rely on the mixed court system. Juries are entirely composed of lay citizens serving limited terms, often only the length of one case. These shorter commitments allow for more diverse juries, who benefit from a broader range of strengths and perspectives when deliberating. They also minimize pressure to appease judges or other officials, who they are unlikely to encounter in the future. This greater independence can be challenging, however, as juries with minimal professional guidance and experience may feel unsupported. Mixed courts combine professional judges with citizen judges, who are selected for terms that can last several years. Lay judges get to accumulate experience and build relationships over time, benefiting from the expertise of their professional counterparts. However, this leaves them more vulnerable to influence from the professional judges who may have their own agendas.
But even ostensibly similar countries can have wildly different lay participation systems. For instance, the word “jury” has numerous definitions, depending on where you are.
“Our collaborators from Argentina would say that if we were to transplant a jury, it would feel like a Trojan horse, because it would require so many changes in the criminal procedure, and maybe criminal law as well,” Professor Kutnjak Ivković explains. “You might typically think about a traditional English jury of twelve people making decisions about guilt, whereas they can be advisory juries, they can be juries who are not deliberating at all. Like in Brazil, they simply vote on the decision.”
By creating a respectful space for exploring these differences, CRN 4 has become a resource, not just for scholars, but for governments around the globe. Professor Hans, Professor Kutnjak Ivković, and other CRN members, such as Northwestern Law School/American Bar Foundation Research Professor Shari Diamond, have worked as consultants for the Japanese and Argentinian governments, among others. Professor Hans was particularly inspired by her work with South Korea, who sought her perspective after establishing an advisory jury system.
“It was absolutely fascinating to be able to bring the kind of expertise our group had together with people who had country knowledge and were able to talk about…how they were trying to prepare for the introduction of these new systems of lay participation in their countries,” says Professor Hans.
“I really feel that the Law and Society Association, and the way we conceive being open to different systems, has helped that international collaboration,” adds Professor Rose. “Because you could imagine it being like, Valerie goes down to Argentina and tells them how the jury system is supposed to work…and it was very much not that.”
Running CRN 4 allows Professors Hans, Kutnjak Ivković, and Rose to recreate these opportunities for cultural and intellectual exchange. The network regularly teams up with CRN 33: East Asian Law and Society to co-sponsor panel discussions. With financial assistance from LSA, they have been able to help scholars from South America attend annual meetings. In addition to hosting special CRN dinners each year, the group embarks on field trips—at the annual meeting in Chicago earlier this summer, they toured federal and state courts, something they plan to repeat at next year’s annual meeting in San Francisco. The group stays up to date via their listserv, as well as their webpage.
These moments of connection, both big and small, have benefited members, and the field of lay participation as a whole. Several ongoing research projects trace their origins back to CRN 4, and in 2021, Professors Hans and Kutnjak Ivković, along with Professor Diamond and Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Nancy S. Marder, released an edited volume, Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts: A Global Perspective.
Maintaining a group’s momentum for 24 years is no small task, but for the three professors, the rewards have been worth the struggle—the collective struggle, that is.
“What you realize is—it’s kind of corny—it takes a village,” says Professor Hans. “It needs collaboration among a large number of people to make it work.”
Professor Rose agrees. “It comes with the spirit that, I think, Law and Society cultivates in scholars…‘What do you need, and how can I be helpful?’…it is seeing fruit, but it is a particular kind of cooperative, collaborative fruit.”