Juror's doxa - when the court puts the law book aside

Within this doctoral project, so-called juror judgments are studied. Nominee judgments mean legal decisions where the court's non-legally trained judges, i.e. the nominees, voted down the court's legal judges and thus decided the outcome. In recent years, a number of jury judgments have attracted media attention and, in connection with this, both the cases in question and the jury system as a whole have been criticized. Among other things, there have been opinions that the jury members, in these cases, do not judge based on current law but instead base their judgments on prejudices and preconceived notions. This study is interdisciplinary between the subjects of rhetoric and jurisprudence. The study analyzes in depth the written reasons for the judgments of jurors with the help of rhetorical theory. The purpose is partly to examine the reasons why the members of the tribunal vote as they do in these cases and partly to study how these decisions are motivated. There is also a particular focus on mapping and examining whether the arguments that the members of the tribunal use to justify the verdict are supported by current law or not. In cases where there is no legal support for the decision, the arguments used are analyzed in order to find out where these arguments are taken from instead and how they are structured. The study highlights the current issue of the presence or absence of lay judges in Swedish legal processes and maps the differences between the lay judges and the legal judges' way of arguing.