Law students at Cornell are gaining an extralegal perspective on the workings of juries, thanks to Valerie Hans and her training in social sciences and psychology.

In 2005 Hans joined the Cornell Law School faculty as a professor of law, without a law degree but with a reputation as one of the nation's leading experts on the jury system, with published books and numerous other writings on social science and the law.

"The jury is a microcosm of the public's views on any issue," Hans said. "The research shows that representative juries that engage in vigorous discussion are generally sound decision-makers."

Hans earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and was on the University of Delaware faculty for 25 years before coming to Cornell. She first became interested in legal issues as an undergraduate in the early '70s at the University of California-San Diego, when a graduate student gave her a research paper examining whether mock juries were biased by learning about a defendant's criminal record. (They were.)

"I said, 'This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.' I love social science methods, and the study used them to address a very important issue on fairness in legal proceedings."

Her first course at Cornell, The Contemporary American Jury, gave future attorneys a peek inside the "black box" by seeing how jurors look at the evidence of a case, how they reach decisions, and when and why dissenting opinions by individual jurors are not voiced.

"It was a lot of fun to talk to law students about the research on litigation and juries," Hans said. "Many of our students will be engaged in litigation, whether it's in prosecutors' offices or private firms. It was an interesting challenge to relate the scholarly work on juries to these contexts."

On May 16 at a conference at the University of Nebraska, she co-presented two lectures on jury decision-making about punitive damages and whiplash, topics that range "from one of the most severe judgments juries make to one of the most trivial injuries they evaluate," she said.

Her paper on punitive damages, written with Cornell Professors Ted Eisenberg, law, and Marty Wells, statistics, "measures the relationship between compensatory and punitive damage awards," Hans said. "Some people worry that juries give high punitive damage awards for no reason." In fact, she said, "We find that there is a strong link between compensatory and punitive damages."

Hans also is helping students prepare for changes already occurring in how jury trials are conducted.

"Jury trials are a wonderful opportunity to control information," Hans said. "A judge always knows if a defendant has a criminal record or not, and you can keep that information from the jury.

"At the same time," she said, "there is a movement in the legal field to give jurors more tools and information, to make them more collaborative in a jury trial -- even to allow them to ask questions in a trial."

The American Bar Association endorses the "active jury" practice, but "it's a tough sell," Hans said. "My law students were concerned about the idea. If you let jurors ask questions, that takes away lawyers' control of the case. The idea of lawyers working their magic on a passive jury is enticing. But, welcome to the future. Our students are likely to encounter active, question-asking jurors in their practice, so they need to be ready for it."

Hans' research methods have included systematic studies and databases of jury cases, interviews with jurors over a number of cases, and questionnaires for judges, jurors, prosecutors and defense attorneys, in part "to try to determine if judges and jurors were seeing cases in the same way."

She co-authored "Judging the Jury" (1986), and her other books include "Business on Trial: The Civil Jury and Corporate Responsibility" (2000). She is editing "The Jury System: Contemporary Scholarship," to be published later this year. Hans' other writing and research topics include the death penalty, the insanity defense, the litigation explosion, court legitimacy, the adversary system, media impact and a national survey on hung juries.

She will look at discrimination and other issues in a course in spring 2007 on social sciences and the law.

"Social science techniques are important to understanding how discrimination functions, in identifying and showing discrimination," she said. "Statistical analysis allows us to control other aspects of a case while investigating the impact of extralegal variables like a defendant's or a victim's race."

She also is exploring the possibility of a program of lectures and talks on law and psychology, in collaboration with the Departments of Human Development and Psychology.