Researching Civil Justice: Problems and Pitfalls

Previous ICJ research on verdicts in Cook County, Illinois, and San Francisco, California, from 1960 to 1979 indicates that juries in those jurisdictions at the end of the period were seeing cases involving more serious injuries and larger medical expenses than in cases tried at the beginning of the period.But the research also showed that juries were awarding more money at the end of the period than at the beginning for cases with the same degree of severity, suggesting that something other than a shift in the composition of the trial caseload was at work. A.