While the civil jury trial in federal court withers away headed for extinction as discussed in an earlier post, Sixth Circuit Oral Argument Docket: Whatever Happened To The Federal Civil Jury Trial?, a development that even as noted a commentor as Prof. Arthur Miller has lamented, Federal Civil Procedure and the Decline of Jury Trials, the Kentucky Supreme Court took pains recently to reaffirm the primacy of trial by jury in Kentucky's civil justice system in Shelton v. Kentucky Easter Seals Society, No 2011-SC-554 (November 21, 2013).
The opinion by Chief Justice John Minton reminded that Kentucky has not adopted the federal preference for summary judgments:
... with our ... rejection of the much more lenient federal [summary judgment] standard, we expressed our support for a policy that summary judgment is not to be used as a defense mechanism. Instead, summary judgment is to be cautiously employed for cases where there is no legitimate claim under the law and it would be impossible to assert one given the facts. Legitimate claims should be allowed to proceed to a jury. And we should not fear jury determinations. Admittedly, juries may be unpredictable; but relatively recent studies show that juries usually reached the same conclusion a judge would have reached had the judge decided the case as a matter of law.
And Chief Justice Minton went further declaring "that the role of the jury is held in high esteem and should not be limited except in clear circumstances" and quoted from one of the Kentucky Supreme Court's prior decisions, Horton v. Union Light, Heat & Power Co., 690 S.W.2d 382 (Ky. 1995):
The more judges take cases away from juries, the more the concepts of reasonable conduct, negligence and gross negligence become synonymous with the view of the judge or judges on that court. Likewise, the more the interpretative power is delegated to juries, the more these concepts become the aggregate of discrete findings by juries. ... The role of the jury in interpreting the evidence and finding the ultimate facts is an American tradition so fundamental as to merit constitutional recognition. ... The conscience of the community speaks to the verdict of the jury, not the judge's view of the evidence. It may well be that deciding when to take a case away from the jury is a matter of degree, a line drawn in the sand, but this is all the more reason why the judiciary should be careful not to overstep the line.
As trial by jury disappears from the federal courts, these reminders from our Kentucky Supreme Court are nearly thrilling.
Robert L. Abell
www.RobertAbellLaw.com
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