This paper is not about juries as such, but about their role in the complex of adjudication, bargaining and maneuver that constitutes the American system of civil litigation. I have elsewhere insisted, not entirely facetiously, that we should refer to this as a system of "litigotiation," in which adjudication and negotiation are blended into a single system of disputing in the vicinity of courts. 1 In many sectors of our disputing system, jury trials are thought to form the apex of a pyramid of cases, most of which are settled "in the shadow" of expected jury verdicts. The effects of juries then depend upon professional and non-professional legal actors' estimates of the propensities of juries. These estimates reflect what juries have done-so far as this is known to subsequent legal actors. Thus, the inquiry is a double one into what juries do find how we form our working knowledge of what they do. This paper begins with contemporary discontent with civil juries. It proceeds to sketch the contours of their work and how these have changed over the past generation. It then examines the way that practitioner and public knowledge about juries is formed, communicated and used. In exploring the use of this jury knowledge in the litigotiation process, questions are raised about the adequacy of the received notion of hierarchic control that underlies the pyramid and bargaining-in-the-shadow images. Finally, this paper examines how jury knowledge combines with other features of the litigotiation process to contribute to the sense of instability and unpredictability that feeds the controversy that was our starting point.