Selecting Proportional Juries

Abstract

I study the problem of selecting a jury from a qualified panel. Every jurisdiction in the United States (with the exception of Arizona) allows litigants to exercise peremptory strikes on the panel to eliminate potential jurors, with the remaining individuals being seated on the final jury. However, such a system prevents litigants from guaranteeing that the jury is proportional with respect to their preferred characteristic, particularly when only a minority of panel members exhibit that characteristic. Although some legal scholars have suggested affirmative selection, wherein litigants choose whom they want on the jury, as an alternative, this system also does not guarantee proportional juries. In this paper, I formalize ``proportionality" and show that there exists a family of methods that mix peremptory strikes and affirmative selection that allow litigants to guarantee that the jury is proportional with respect to their preferences over the panel.