JUSTICE, DEMOCRACY AND THE JURY by James Gobert. Brookfield: Ashgate/Dartmouth Publishing Co., 1997. 225 pages (plus bibliography and index). Cloth $72.95. ISBN 1855212633.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Dale. Department of History, Clemson University. E-Mail: edale@clemson.edu.

Gobert, a professor of law at the University of Essex, explains in his preface that this book's aim is to examine "the core concept of the jury as a body of ordinary citizens, drawn together at random from a community, which is brought together to hear evidence and decide a particular controversy before them." (ix) In fact, his book goes beyond that point, using the jury to examine the relationship between law and justice within a democratic system.

At this point, I should offer a disclaimer similar to the one that Gobert provides in his preface. This book, as he admits, is a self-consciously interdisciplinary investigation of juries, and their relationship to law, justice, and democracy. To support his claims and suggestions, Gobert borrows from philosophers of law, political scientists, legal scholars and psychologists, and attempts to meld their ideas together into a coherent whole. As he notes, the result is a work that may strike specialists in any of those areas as being simplistic.

Like Gobert, I am not a philosopher, political scientist, or psychologist. I was, for seven years, a trial lawyer, and I am now a legal historian. One of my current areas of interest is the intersection of law and justice, and the role of popular influences (including, but not limited to the jury) on the legal system, but my work on juries has been at best eclectic, and at worst, perhaps (in the eyes of those who are specialists), haphazard.

That does not pose a problem in reviewing this book, because Gobert intends it to be a work for an educated, but unspecialized audience. And as such, the book succeeds in many respects (though see below). He has set the book up in a series of chapters that are essays examining the role of the jury from a variety of perspectives. Each chapter then builds on the ideas of the previous chapters, so that new ideas are raised as the reader works through the book.

Thus, in the first he posits a conflict between the rule of law and the need to have the courts do justice, and then examines the jury's role in that dynamic. In the second, he builds on that analysis, exploring the limitations (institutional and societal) that stop juries from being the voice of justice within a legal system. In the third chapter, he considers the relationship between the judge and jury, investigating the way they represent the sometimes conflicting aims of the rule of law and justice. The next two chapters explore the role juries play in a democratic society, and the practical limitations on that role. He then ends with a chapter that is a review of works proposing solutions to some of the problems with juries (exploring, for example, juror training, its promises and its pitfalls), and a conclusion that argues that juries are a way of revitalizing representative and Democratic government.

As an effort to provoke thought about law and justice, about the jury's role in law, about the failures and promise of the jury system, and about democracy more generally, the work is reasonably well organized (though I am not convinced that the way to resuscitate late twentieth century democracy is through the jury system). As a synthesis that intends to introduce readers to some major works on juries, and major thinkers about law, while making an argument derived from those works, it is also reasonably successful. But as that brief summary of the book's content suggests, it is a study that covers an enormous amount of ground in its 225 pages of text. At best, under those circumstances, it raises issues and thoughts, and directs the interested reader to other sources to flesh those ideas out.

That raises the question of who that reader might be. Specialists, of various types, in the area of jury work will probably find little in this work. Even those, like me, who study juries from a slightly different, nonspecialized perspective and who seek more depth, will probably find nothing novel in this work, though I found it helpful to the extent that it made me focus some of my thoughts about the juries from the late nineteenth-century United States that I have studied.

The book would, however, be helpful to two groups of people. Students, either law students or undergraduates in a course on law or the legal system, might find the book a good introduction to the questions posed by a system of law that relies on juries, and the book could generate good discussion or be an appropriate starting point for student papers focusing on a particular aspect of the jury's role. Likewise, the book is set at such a level that those outside the academic world, who are interested in law and the legal system, would probably find the book a handy, and perhaps provocative, introduction to an aspect of the legal system that they may know little about.

In short, the book strikes me as a good introduction for an educated general reader, it is readable enough that it will not annoy those who are not used to (or inured to) academic style, yet it is rigorous enough that those who read it will have at least to examine their assumptions along the way. But here, there is a problem that Gobert presumably has no control over. A hardback book that costs nearly $75.00 is a book that I, at least, would be hesitant to assign to a class. While there are, of course, textbooks and casebooks that cost that much, those books typically are used for an entire semester or even year long course. This book might serve for a week's worth of reading, but hardly more than that. A book this expensive, that is this short, is simply a book that costs too much to assign. It also strikes me as being a book that is too expensive to serve the general, nonacademic reader.

Once, perhaps, libraries would buy books at this price and so the cost would not be passed along to the reader. But those days are gone as well. My university library severely limits its purchases of books each year. Given a budget for my department's library purchases that means I can only recommend the university library make a couple of hundred dollars worth of purchases in a year, I simply cannot recommend that the library buy this book, when it could, for the same cost, buy two other hardbacks or three trade quality paperback books.

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