Here's an interesting blog post that I thought I'd share ...

Juror Unanimity Isn't Necessarily a Great Thing: A Guest Post
By Ethan Leib

Thanks for putting up with my quirky intellectual agenda of friendship and the law in the last two posts. For my final post, I thought I would highlight a more traditional area of my legal research: the jury.

There is something quirky at play here too: the U.S. is one of the few democracies around the world to have a unanimity rule for juror decision-making. The [New York] Times's Adam Liptak has been doing a series on American Exceptionalism -- commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are virtually unique in the world -- but he has yet to focus on the puzzling persistence of unanimity as our jury decision rule.

Here are a few facts that make unanimity a non-obvious choice for juror decision-making:

For the intriguing list, see the rest of the article on
the Freakonomics Blog.