| Popis: |
Ask a federal prosecutor to describe an average day at work, and chances are they will not mention a jury trial. Yet when prosecutors talk about how they do their jobs and what their jobs mean to them, jurors seem to be everywhere. It is the figure and role of this imagined juror in the professional lives of prosecutors that is the subject of this book. Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of federal prosecutors, The Imagined Juror explores this paradoxical feature of the federal legal landscape: though laypeople participate in federal trials infrequently, hypothetical jurors loom large in the decision-making and professional imagination of some of our most powerful legal actors. Through imagining jurors, prosecutors discover a critical resource for making sense of their ill-defined directives to seek justice and represent the United States. They also find a way of discussing mercy, acknowledging evolving community mores, and discovering themselves as moral actors rather than line attorneys carrying out supervisors’ directives. At the same time, the book highlights the limitation of a legal system where jurors are primarily imaginary, calling for reforms that would foster a more inclusive and effective American jury. |
