Law: Now Juries Are on Trial

"Big cases" call into question their ability to do justice

The First Congress proposed the Seventh Amendment, guaranteeing the right to a jury trial "in Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars." But back in 1789 they could never have imagined anything like Memorex vs. IBM.

To decide whether IBM had monopolized various markets claimed in Memorex's $900 million antitrust suit, jurors needed a detailed understanding of things like "reverse engineering," "cross elasticity of supply" and "subordinated debentures." The trial lasted 96 days. The jury heard 87 witnesses and examined some 3,000 exhibits. After deliberating for 19 more days, it could not reach a unanimous verdict. Federal Judge Samuel Conti declared a mistrial. He then ruled in favor of IBM, though the jury had favored Memorex by 9 to 2. Suspecting that the jurors were baffled by the whole case, Judge Conti began asking them questions about the evidence. The answers were confused. Declaring that "the magnitude and complexity of the present lawsuit render it as a whole beyond the ability and competency of any jury to understand and decide rationally," Conti ruled that if the case had to be retried, it should be heard by a judge, without a jury.

Now on appeal, Memorex is what is known as a "big case": a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that involves mountains of evidence and may take months or years to resolve. Increasingly common, such civil cases pose a dilemma. They are generally within the broad definition given by the U.S. Supreme Court to "Suits at common law." Thus they come under the jury-trial guarantee of the Seventh Amendment. (State courts are not bound by the Seventh, but most states have similar guarantees.) Such cases add to the burdens on the already overloaded courts. More important, if the jury cannot understand the issues, the right to a jury may conflict with something more basic, the right to a fair trial.

Only about half a dozen federal judges have so far refused to allow jury trials, using as an excuse a lone footnote in a 1970 Supreme Court decision suggesting that the Seventh Amendment right to a jury may be limited by "the practical abilities and limitations" of jurors. But earlier this month U.S. Supreme court Chief Justice Warren Burger joined a growing number of bench and bar leaders who question whether modern juries can understand, much less fairly decide, complex, protracted cases.