Persona" and Interpersonal Uses of Professional Folklore: Peremptory Juror Challenges by Lore and in Fact

Abstract

An attempt is made to explore the legal and non-legal (sociological) utility of the folklore of the art of juror selection to the practicing trial lawyer of the Chicago Personal Injury Bar. The lore concerning the choosing of jurors in personal injury cases may be seen as: a) useful to a lawyer in predicting juror verdict-deliberation behavior; b) useful for predicting jury verdict outcomes; and, c) useful for rationalizing the work world of the personal injury trial lawyer. To corroborate these working hypotheses, 55 Chicago personal injury trial lawyer specialists (those spending 85 percent of their time on such cases) were interviewed with field notes recorded immediately upon termination of session. This was the exploratory phase of some research which resulted in the administering of a questionnaire for a verification-type study of the roles and values of such legal specialists. The sample was generated by the referral or reputation technique ("snowball sampling"). As far as can be determined, the universe of these lawyer-specialists was exhaus-ted; In outline, after the lore is discussed as a resource upon which the practitioner calls in his jury trial of a cause, a short overview of the folklore is presented to orient the reader as to its nature and the issues it can raise. Then a discussion follows, couched in the field interview data, considering whether the lawyer, in fact, employs this lore-based knowledge to direct his selection of jurors. An explanation is then presented to express what this investigator considers to be some important social-psychological functions of the folklore to the practitioner of. the art of juror selection. In conclusion, the lore is shown to lack agreement among practitioners as to its usefulness--the lore is proverbial, contradictory, and too extravagantly specific to be practical. Hence, it is concluded from these data that the lore yields little predictive capability about juror verdict behavior. This seemingly renders it unusable and, hence, discardable. Nevertheless, the lore continues to flourish as a part of trial technique. The lore is discussed as having three functions for the practitioner: 1) for orientation toward the problem of selection; 2) for a posteriori rationalizing of jury verdict outcomes and juror verdict behavior; and 3) for professional communication (to laymenclients and fellow professionals--adversary or colleague) involving the demonstration and/or continuation of professional competence.