No sales ban or retrial in US; Samsung ends EU injunction requests
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 18th Dec 2012 14:31 UTC
Legal Lots of news about Apple vs. Samsung (and vice versa) in both the US and Europe today. In the US, judge Koh dealth two blows: one to Samsung (no retrial based on juror misconduct), the other to Apple (no permanent sales ban). In Europe, in the meantime, Samsung announced it will cease all lawsuits injunction requests against Apple... But only in Europe.
E-mail Print r 2   · Read More · 74 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/kjh
Permalink for comment 545748
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: Jury qualifications?
by saso on Tue 18th Dec 2012 20:33 UTC in reply to "RE: Jury qualifications?"
saso
Member since:
2007-04-18

Because this flies in the face of the very foundations of democracy and would cause the entire legal structure to grind to a halt and cease functioning?

There is so much wrong with this statement, I'm almost at a loss as to where to start deconstructing it first.

1) Your statement is just plain false. Jury trials are used pretty much only in common-law systems (containing a small portion of the world's population). Now look at e.g. those poor Europeans! (hint: it's satire) So even without a jury, legal systems seem to work just fine.

2) Democracy is a form of government, which is (hopefully) distinct from the judiciary.

3) Most importantly, and I can't stress this enough: justice isn't a democratic process! We don't get to decide democratically on what the truth is. Justice, like science, is dedicated to the pursuit of truth and what really transpired, otherwise it would just devolve into a tyranny of the majority - see ancient Athens for an experiment in that.

If a court could only seat a jury of qualified legal professionals who also happen to be experts in any particular area at question at trial (this could range from computer science, patent law, homicide, forensics, drug trafficking, domestic abuse, psychology, and on and on -- offering covering multiple areas within the same trial), one would likely never face a jury of your peers -- in fact, every court would be very hard pressed to ever fill all the seats in a jury box with such rigorous requirements.


And yet systems like this (though not precisely as much as the scientific peer review meritocracy) routinely operate in most of the world, i.e. in countries which do not have jury trials, but trials are instead decided by a qualified judge or panel of judges.

Reply Parent Score: 4