COMMONSENSE JUSTICE

Commonsense Justice

Commonsense Justice

Introduction

Commonsense Justice is an article of broad scope, embracing issues of substantive constitutional and criminal law and empirical research on juries. Legal professionals may find the lawful issues well known ground. Social psychologists and other ones committed in research on committees may already be well known with the outcome of the empirical research reported. The value of Finke's book is the way he pulls the research findings together to mount a critique of the law and presents an argument for the virtues of commonsense justice. (Norman J 2001)

These commonsense notions are at one time lawful, lesson, and psychological. They supply the citizen on the road and the juror in the committee box with a theory of why people think, seem, and behave as they do, and why the regulation should find some defendants at fault and punishable and others not. Black-letter law also has its ideas of human environment, culpability, and punishment. But there is climbing on and persuasive evidence that the “law on the publications” may be at odds with commonsense justice in numerous areas. (Norman J 2001)

Discussion and Analysis

As long as the Law's adjudicative process still involves “the lengthy constitutional heritage of the jury”, commonsense justice will always be aboard the train—not as a stowaway, not as a standby, but with a sanctioned seat. Despite this heritage, there are some reformers who have urged the exclusion of these ordinary citizens in favor of more elitist alternatives. This call to remove the persons has been particularly strong considering municipal trials. Reformist arguments, although, and the clues cited to boost them, stay suppose, being disobeyed by sounder facts and figures, from sounder methods, along with sounder and more defensible arguments. (Norman J 2001)

Although calls to eliminate commonsense justice from the criminal law side have been fewer, those calls periodically do come, particularly when verdicts in certain high profile cases appear to be indefensible, wrongheaded, and wrong at least to the talking heads, pundits, and armchair jurors who are watching Court TV and making those judgments. But the place of the jury on the criminal law side is firmer, with buttressing evidence coming from death penalty adjudication, where the law wants jurors—the“ conscience of the community” —to have the final say, albeit along guided discretionary lines. (Norman J 2001)

Putting civil and criminal law together, the composite forecast yields safe bet: Given the jury's historical, constitutional, and current ...