While reviewing audio tapes and literature of Moe Levine, a phenomenal personal injury and medical malpractice and negligence lawyer, who passed away nearly 50 years ago, I came upon some nuggets of wisdom. Moe Levine is considered one of the 100 BEST Plaintiff’s lawyers in America.
One of these is on the value and function of a jury. He stated that jurors are not judges without robes but rather they as cumulative body reflect and speak in this case as the “conscience of the community”. I liked that, but I wondered if that was the law in Kentucky.
And yes it is. Powerful language, and the recognition of a role that goes back hundreds of years.
The judicial decision regarding when to save the interpretative function for the court and when to delegate the interpretative function to the jury is crucial to the development of negligence law. 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. See L. Green, Judge and Jury (1930). By delegating interpretation to a jury the judiciary allows current considerations of equity and common sense to modify what might otherwise become anachronistic principles. L. Green, supra, at 385-91. The role of the jury in interpreting the evidence and finding the ultimate facts [**5] is an American tradition so fundamental as to merit constitutional recognition. U.S. Const. Amend. VII; Ky. Const. Sec. 7. The conscience of the community speaks through 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 sand, but this is all the more reason why the judiciary should be careful not to overstep the line.
Horton v. Union Light, Heat & Power Co., No. 84-SC-80-DG, Supreme Court of Kentucky, 690 S.W.2d 382; 1985 Ky. LEXIS 220, April 11, 1985 , Rehearing Denied June 14, 1985
