Definition
In jury procedure, the array is the entire body of prospective jurors summoned to attend court, as they are arranged and listed on the panel. The term carries two related but distinct senses:
1. The collective body itself — all persons who have been summoned and are available for jury selection at a given session of court.
2. The ordered arrangement — the specific sequence or ranking in which jurors' names appear on the panel.
Both senses converge in practice: the array is the panel as constituted, in the order in which it was drawn. To object to the array is to challenge not any individual juror, but the panel as a whole — typically on the ground that it was improperly assembled, drawn from the wrong population, or tainted by misconduct of the summoning officer.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An orderly series, arrangement, or sequence; a large collection laid out to be viewed in full; in computing, a data structure holding multiple elements of the same type.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Order; a regular and imposing arrangement, especially of troops in military order; the body of soldiers so arranged; an imposing series of things.
The common meaning captures the structural idea — ordered arrangement — but misses the legal specificity entirely. In law, array is not merely any orderly collection. It is a term of art for the constituted jury panel, with procedural consequences attached to it. A "challenge to the array" is a formal legal motion; the word carries procedural weight that the ordinary sense of "arrangement" does not.
Common Confusion
Array is frequently encountered alongside panel without clear distinction. The terms are substantially overlapping but not identical: panel refers to the list of jurors summoned, while array emphasizes both the ordered constitution of that list and the collective body it represents. A challenge to the array attacks the process by which the panel was formed; a challenge to the poll targets individual jurors on that panel. Researchers reading historical sources should be careful not to treat these terms as fully interchangeable, even though sources sometimes use them as if they were.
Why It Matters in Research
Array is a term that appears most densely in older criminal procedure materials and in treatises on jury practice. Researchers working in modern sources may find it less common, as contemporary practice more often uses panel or venire. Understanding array is essential for reading historical trial records, writs, and early criminal law treatises where the challenge to the array was a standard defensive maneuver.
Two research traps: First, digital searches for "array" in legal corpora will surface overwhelming false positives — military arrays, legislative arrays, and increasingly, computing contexts. Filtering by adjacent terms (panel, challenge, jurors, venire) is necessary. Second, Rapalje & Lawrence simply cross-references Challenge without defining Array independently — a reminder that some historical dictionaries assume fluency in the procedural context and offer no standalone definition.
The connection between array and challenge to the array is the critical corpus link. Any research thread beginning with array should move immediately to challenge proceedings, grounds for quashing a panel, and the authority of the summoning officer (sheriff or clerk), whose conduct is typically the target of an array challenge. The commissioner of array (arrayer), noted in Bouvier's, is a related historical officer worth tracking in English legal history contexts.
Jurisdictional variation in historical sources is real: English common law practice shaped the term, and American jurisdictions adapted it unevenly across the nineteenth century. State-specific jury statutes may use different vocabulary for the same procedural concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in substantial agreement on the core definition, differing mainly in emphasis and depth.
Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's define array primarily as the whole body of jurors summoned, treating the ordered arrangement as secondary. Burrill's reverses the emphasis, leading with the ranking and ordering function before describing the panel as a whole — a distinction that is analytically useful. Anderson's is spare, offering only "order; arrangement" plus the jury panel sense, but correctly identifies the challenge to the array as the operationally significant concept.
Burrill's is the most informative of the group, noting explicitly that "to challenge the array is to except to the whole panel of jurors" — a functional definition that connects the noun to its procedural consequence. Rapalje & Lawrence, by contrast, add nothing, treating the term as entirely derivative of the Challenge entry.
None of the historical dictionaries address what grounds suffice for a successful challenge to the array, leaving researchers to consult treatises on jury practice for the substantive law. Black's 2nd edition adds a Mississippi case citation (Durrah v. State) not present in the first edition, suggesting modest case law development on the term by the early twentieth century.
Jurisdictional Note
Array as a term of art derives from English common law practice and was adopted broadly across American jurisdictions. Modern American courts more commonly use venire or jury panel for the same concept, and the formal challenge to the array has been largely codified or absorbed into broader motions practice. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century state court records should expect array to appear with technical precision; later sources may use it loosely or not at all.