Should Juries be Unanimous?

The jury trial is a paradigm for legal fact finding, but of course, more hangs on jury decisions than just what we should think. In this talk, I'll present a method for thinking about what we should require of juries in their deliberations. I show that using an agent-based model of group deliberation can help us get a grip on the effects of different decision rules for jury deliberations. This will build on previous work using similar models to look at group polarization and the role of individuals' memories in group deliberations. It will be a work-in-progress talk, so don't expect a lot of answers. But I do hope that the talk will inspire new approaches to how we think about jury (and other small group) deliberation.