"Guardian of Civil Rights... Medieval Relic": The Civil Jury in Canada

Abstract

article offers some explanations of why Canadian civil juries exist only at the margins by examining the availability of civil juries, empirical evidence regarding their use and cost in Ontario (the only province for which such information exists on a systematic basis), and academic and policy debates concerning their role.

The levers of legal design: Institutional determinants of the quality of law

“…Civil juries are virtually nonexistent in the UK. In Canada, some provinces prohibit civil juries entirely, while in other provinces the availability of juries is a matter of judicial discretion; in one study, it was estimated that juries heard cases in 3-10% of civil trials in British Columbia, and 22% in Ontario in the early 1990s (Bogart, 1999). Even in the US the actual incidence of jury trials is low; Hadfield (2005) estimates, for example, that in 2000 approximately 37% of contested 5 US federal civil cases were disposed of by judicial decision on a pre-trial motion or a bench trial while only 2.5% were disposed of after a jury trial; there were almost three times as many bench trials as jury trials.…”

Effects of group decision rules on decisions involving continuous alternatives: The unanimity rule and extreme decisions in mock civil juries

“…Nevertheless, the use of juries for resolving civil conflicts has not been uncontroversial (cf. Bogart, 2000;Landsman, 2000), due in part to the high levels of damages that have been awarded in certain cases.…”