Medieval English Juries

Daniel Klerman, University of Southern California Law School, has published The Selection of Thirteenth-Century Disputes for Litigation, as USC Law School Olin Research Paper No. 00-10. Here is the abstract.

Priest and Klein's seminal 1984 article argued that litigated cases differ systematically and predictably from settled cases. This article tests the Priest-Klein selection model using a data set of thirteenth-century English cases. These cases are especially informative because juries rendered verdicts even in settled cases, so one can directly compare verdicts in settled and litigated cases. The results are consistent with the predictions of the Priest-Klein article, as well as with the asymmetric-information selection models developed by Hylton and Shavell.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.