Jury "Duty" and the Thirteenth Amendment

I had to report for jury selection today. Every single one of the 150+ people sitting with me in the jury room from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM (when we were dismissed) had pretty much their entire day wasted. No one was called into a courtroom. So I had seven full hours to ponder the nature of our hallowed jury selection system.

The instructor told us that Los Angeles County used to summon jurors based on the registered voter list, but eventually people stopped registering to vote. Now it summons jurors from two lists: (1) registered voters and (2) drivers registered through the DMV. As the Missing Persons' '80s pop song "Walking in L.A." declares, nobody walks in L.A. (nor do most of them use mass transit). So the second list covers most everyone who speaks English -- and a good chunk of the ones who don't. Pretty big selection pool, right? You bet. And yet the instructor told us they usually cycle through the list completely every 12 to 18 months. That's a heck of a lot of court cases -- and a heck of a lot of involuntary servitude!

Wait... involuntary servitude? Slavery? Doesn't the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantee us freedom from that? Indeed it does. Read it yourself:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

But how does one reconcile that with Article Three of the U.S. Constitution and the Sixth, Seventh, and Fourteenth Amendments, all of which guarantee or preserve the right to a trial by jury? If the government doesn't force people to serve as jurors, how can those parts of the Constitution be upheld? Simple. People are so used to the existing jury selection system that they forget the government does not necessarily have to force people to serve as jurors.

As Murray Rothbard writes on p. 110 of For a New Liberty:

...there is [a] cornerstone of the judicial system which has unaccountably gone unchallenged, even by libertarians, for far too long. This is compulsory jury service. There is little difference in kind, though obviously a great difference in degree, between compulsory jury duty and conscription; both are enslavement, both compel the individual to perform tasks on the State’s behalf and at the State’s bidding. And both are a function of pay at slave wages. Just as the shortage of voluntary enlistees in the army is a function of a pay scale far below the market wage, so the abysmally low pay for jury service insures that, even if jury “enlistments” were possible, not many would be forthcoming. Furthermore, not only are jurors coerced into attending and serving on juries, but sometimes they are locked behind closed doors for many weeks, and prohibited from reading newspapers. What is this but prison and involuntary servitude for noncriminals?

In other words, why doesn't the government offer to pay jurors a wage that is high enough that the needed number of jurors will voluntarily serve? Is slave labor really necessary? Rothbard continues:

It will be objected that jury service is a highly important civic function, and insures a fair trial which a defendant may not obtain from the judge, especially since the judge is part of the State system and therefore liable to be partial to the prosecutor’s case. Very true, but precisely because the service is so vital, it is particularly important that it be performed by people who do it gladly, and voluntarily. Have we forgotten that free labor is happier and more efficient than slave labor? The abolition of jury-slavery should be a vital plank in any libertarian platform. The judges are not conscripted; neither are the opposing lawyers; and neither should the jurors.

Imagine what jury selection would be like in a free-market, libertarian society. Think of the focus on efficiency and customer satisfaction that exists in the less regulated sectors of the economy. Now apply it to the legal system. Can you imagine walking into a courthouse, greeted not by blank expressions and robotic orders mumbled by condescending government bureaucrats, but by smiles and welcomes offered by private-sector employees who have an economic incentive to treat you with respect? Can you imagine not wasting most of an entire day sitting in a waiting room, but getting selected or dismissed as quickly as possible by employees who have an economic incentive to minimize your time spent waiting (since they are paying you dearly for your time)? And can you imagine not being forced to serve as a juror, but choosing to do it based on the competitive wage offered by the court?

Imagining a different world is the first step towards bringing it into existence.