Page "Jury trial" Paragraph 1

Jury trials are used in a significant share of serious criminal cases in all common law legal systems, and juries or lay judges have been incorporated into the legal systems of many civil law countries for criminal cases.

Only the United States and Canada make routine use of jury trials in a wide variety of non-criminal cases.

Other common law legal jurisdictions use jury trials only in a very select class of cases that make up a tiny share of the overall civil docket ( e. g. defamation suits in England and Wales ), while true civil jury trials are almost entirely absent elsewhere in the world.

Some civil law jurisdictions do, however, have arbitration panels with non-legally trained members decide cases in select subject-matter areas relevant to the arbitration panel members ' areas of expertise.