By Judge Carolyn Jewett-Platts
Each year on May 1, Law Day is observed across the United States to celebrate the rule of law and to educate people about our legal system. The 2025 Law Day theme is, “The Constitution’s Promise: Out of Many, One.” (The official United States motto, E pluribus unum, is Latin for “out of many, one.”)
When I reflected on this year’s theme, I wanted to highlight a part of our justice system that doesn’t always inspire celebration: jury duty. In popular culture, jury duty is a chore that most people dread (with countless jokes on sitcoms about how hard it is to avoid). To add to the challenge, between time off work and paying for child care, serving on a jury can also be a financial sacrifice.
However, jury service isn’t just a duty or obligation. It’s one of the most direct ways that you can participate in our democracy and a cornerstone of our American justice system.
Over the centuries, many Americans have fought for the right to serve as jurors. The right to have your case heard by an impartial jury has been in the United States Constitution since 1791, but for over a hundred years after that, women were not allowed to serve as jurors. Washington was the first state in the union to allow female jurors in 1911, but women were allowed to opt out of jury duty without giving a reason, meaning that jury pools were overwhelmingly male until the law was changed in 1967.
Women were not the only ones excluded. In 1791, only white men were permitted to serve on juries. The United States Congress guaranteed Black men the right to serve on juries after the Civil War in 1875, but racial segregation and discrimination persisted in many states. Key decisions by the United States Supreme Court (Norris v. Alabama in 1935, and Batson v. Kentucky in 1986) finally provided more enforcement against discrimination in jury selection. As recently as 2018, the Washington Supreme Court adopted a court rule, General Rule 37, to provide stronger protection from racial bias in jury selection.
These changes didn’t happen overnight. Instead, civil rights advocates fought persistently, over hundreds of years, to make sure that all adult American citizens have the right to serve on a jury. What’s more, they persuaded the people in power over and over that it is necessary to our system of justice.
Why is it necessary? In the modern era, research has proven that juries made up of people who are different from each other make better decisions than juries made of those who are similar. Two people with different perspectives on the same evidence can discuss and evaluate the evidence more critically. Each juror considers the evidence in a unique way, and they share their experience and opinions with the other jurors. When a whole group of people are excluded from jury service, we are losing out on the opportunity for another viewpoint – one that may be critical to fairly judging the facts of the case. It takes all of us cooperating to serve justice: out of many, one.
This Law Day, I ask you: Are you someone who can carefully listen to evidence, set aside your personal feelings and work with others in a team? If you are, the next time you receive a jury summons in the mail, remember that jury duty is an opportunity. You have the opportunity to serve your community, to bring your perspective and experience to the case and to share in a unique right of American citizenship.
