University of Florida Levin College of Law UF Law Scholarship Repository UF Law Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 2018 Trials by Peers: The bbE and Flow of the Criminal Jury in France and Belgium Claire M. Germain University of Florida Levin College of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, and the Criminal Law Commons Recommended Citation Claire M. Germain, Trials by Peers: The Ebb and Flow of the Criminal Jury in France and Belgium, in Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts: A Global Perspective (Sanja Kutnjak Ivković et al., eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019). This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at UF Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in UF Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UF Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Trials by Peers: The Ebb and Flow of the Criminal Jury in France and Belgium Claire M. Germain1 Abstract The participation of lay jurors in criminal courts has known much ebb and flow both in France and in Belgium. These two countries belong to the civil law tradition, where juries are the exception rather than the rule in criminal trials, and they only exist in criminal cases, not civil cases. In spite of some similarities, there are substantial differences between the two countries, and their systems will be examined in turn. In France, the Cour d’assises itself was inherited from the French Revolution.