Hey, You: Stop Bitching About Jury Duty

I spent three days in jury selection over the past week.

It wasn’t much fun.

Especially since, after the various lawyers involved each gave their synopsis of the case, it was obvious that it was one of those situations where everyone involved was an asshole and the jury’s job was just going to be weighing exactly how much each bit of assholery mattered to come to a final number that someone had to pay to someone else.

This is before evidence, by the way; this is just from what each lawyer had to say that they’d be arguing on behalf of their clients. It was literally a situation where if you just assumed everything they each said was true, and none of their claims actually contradicted each other so that was actually possible, then they all sucked.

But the jury’s job would be to decide how the money should flow between them.

And they predicted that the trial would take eight weeks. Half days, but still eight weeks.

For real; no fun.

But it’s not supposed to be fun.

We have jurys for two reasons:

the community is there to decide disputes between members who cannot come to agreement between themselves
these decisions should be made directly by other community members, and not made by the State

From a practical perspective, a community that allows private disputes to escalate to violence is unstable and depends on the goodwill and restraint of the most powerful members to remain stable. At any point, they could just choose to exercise their power directly to assume control. Equally, the wealthy or powerful in such a community are always at risk from collective action of the (individually) less powerful.

If either side messes up that balance, then the community fails and everyone suffers.

In addition, requiring the members of the community to participate personally reinforces the existence of the community and each individual’s membership in it.

These are important.

But more importantly, we have jurys because they reduce the risk of the courts being fully captured or subverted to serve some interest other than the community’s.

Anything the State is entrusted with that doesn’t depend on the direct participation of the citizens can be taken over. Executive departments are particularly prone to this problem, since they usually have no direct citizen participation in them at all.

This is why I particularly dislike California’s propensity for government by appointed commissions, for example.

But systems that require participation by the citizens, especially randomly-selected citizens, cannot be fully controlled.

Jurys protect the court system.

So, the next time you get that postcard in the mail with the “Jury Summons” banner on it, try to think of it as a chance to do your part to keep our courts independent and serving the community.

I do realize that jury service is difficult, and not everyone can do it without suffering serious hardship. This is a real problem with how we do jurys in this country, and we should fix that.

It’s also a real problem that we have citizens so precarious that the current mode of jury service could be a hardship. Frankly, you shouldn’t feel particularly obligated to help protect a system that’s put you in such a position.

But if you can, then show up, do your part.

And stop bitching about it.