Although most countries around the world use professional judges, they also rely on lay citizens, untrained in the law, to decide criminal cases. The participation of lay citizens helps to incorporate community perspectives into legal outcomes and to provide greater legitimacy for the legal system and its verdicts. This book offers a comprehensive and comparative picture of how nations use lay people in legal decision-making. It provides a much-needed, in-depth analysis of the different approaches to citizen participation and considers why some countries' use of lay participation is long-standing whereas other countries alter or abandon their efforts. This book examines the many ways in which countries around the world embrace, reject, or reform the way in which they use ordinary citizens in legal decision-making.

Sanja Kutnjak Ivković is a Professor at Michigan State University, School of Criminal Justice. She holds a doctorate in criminology and a doctorate in law. She received the 2017 Mueller Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Criminal Justice from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences International Section. She serves as the Chair of the Division of International Criminology, American Society of Criminology, and is the co-founder and co-chair of the Law and Society Association Collaborative Research Network on Lay Participation in Legal Systems. Shari Diamond is Howard J. Trienens Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. She was the editor of the Law & Society Review and past president of the American Psychology-Law Society. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy and the Harry Kalven, Jr. Award from the Law and Society Association for contributions to research in law and society. Valerie P. Hans is Charles F. Rechlin Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. She has conducted extensive empirical research on jury systems around the world. She writes and lectures widely about juries and legal reform and is currently studying the introduction of new systems of lay participation in different countries. She is a member of the American Law Institute and past president of the Law and Society Association. Along with Sanja Kutnjak Ivković and Mary Rose, she co-founded and currently co-chairs the Law and Society Association's Collaborative Research Network on Lay Participation in Legal Systems. Nancy S. Marder is Professor of Law and founding Director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center at Chicago-Kent College of Law.  She was a law clerk for United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in whose honor the Jury Center is named.  She is the author of The Jury Process (2005), which is the basis of her law school course “Juries, Judges and Trials."  Recently, she received the Inaugural Freehling Award at Chicago-Kent and the Senior Fellowship at the Baldy Center, which enabled her to work on another book, The Power of the Jury:  Transforming Citizens into Jurors.