Definition
A juror is an individual member of a jury — a person selected, summoned, and sworn to hear evidence in a legal proceeding and render a verdict or finding according to law. The juror's role is defined by the oath taken and the duty to decide facts impartially based on the evidence presented at trial.
In modern practice, jurors serve in two primary contexts: (1) petit jurors, who sit on trial juries in civil or criminal cases and determine guilt, liability, or damages; and (2) grand jurors, who serve on grand juries and decide whether sufficient evidence exists to indict a person on criminal charges. The distinction matters because the duties, procedures, and constitutional protections differ substantially between the two.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A member of a jury.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A member of a jury; a juryman. Also, a member of any jury for awarding prizes.
The common and legal meanings are largely aligned, but Webster's 1913 flags one meaningful divergence: in ordinary English, "jury" and "juror" extended naturally to prize competitions and awards panels, a usage that carries no legal weight. In legal research, "juror" refers exclusively to a person sworn in a judicial or quasi-judicial proceeding. The prize-panel sense is irrelevant to legal sources and should not color interpretation of the term in legal texts.
Common Confusion
JUROR vs. JUROR'S BOOK: Black's 2nd Edition notes a distinct entry for "Juror's Book" — a list of persons qualified to serve on juries. The book is an administrative document; a juror is the individual drawn from it. Researchers encountering references to a "juror's book" in historical court records should not treat it as synonymous with a jury list or venire, though the terms are closely related.
JUROR vs. NON-JUROR: Both editions of Black's flag the etymological overlap. A "non-juror" historically referred not to someone disqualified from jury service but to a person who refused to take a particular oath — specifically, in English history, those who refused the oaths of allegiance and supremacy after 1688. The shared root (one who swears an oath) means the term "juror" in very old texts occasionally appears in this broader oath-taking sense. Context is essential.
Why It Matters in Research
The term itself is stable, but the legal framework surrounding jurors has shifted considerably and creates navigational traps in historical sources.
Qualification standards have changed dramatically. Who counted as a legally competent juror varied by era, jurisdiction, and case type. Property requirements, race exclusions, and sex exclusions were operative law well into the twentieth century. Historical sources may describe the qualified juror pool in terms that are constitutionally defunct. Researchers analyzing historical trial records must not assume modern qualification standards apply.
Voir dire records are a critical but underused source. The examination of prospective jurors — their challenges for cause and peremptory strikes — appears in trial transcripts and court records as a distinct procedural phase. These records illuminate both the standards applied to juror competence at a given time and the practical operation of jury selection in a jurisdiction.
The grand juror / petit juror distinction is frequently collapsed in older sources. Historical statutes and treatises sometimes use "juror" to mean only petit jurors. Researchers working with grand jury materials should verify that the source is not silently limiting the term.
Juror misconduct doctrine and juror immunity have their own substantial literatures. A researcher tracing the history of jury secrecy rules, juror affidavit doctrine, or post-verdict juror interviews will need to track these as sub-topics; the bare term "juror" in an index will not reliably surface them.
Federal and state juror qualification statutes generate separate bodies of case law. The Jury Selection and Service Act governs federal courts; state courts operate under their own frameworks. Historical conflicts between these systems appear in the corpus and require jurisdictional precision.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge tightly on a minimal definition. Black's (both editions) and Burrill agree on the core: one member of a jury, a person sworn on a jury (juratus). Burrill adds the Law French and Latin roots (jurour, jurator) and cross-references United States Digest under "Jurors," pointing researchers toward the case-law digest tradition as the real substance behind the bare entry. Anderson's redirects entirely to JURY, a common economy in period dictionaries that reflects how thinly individual-member entries were developed.
What the historical dictionaries miss almost entirely is the procedural and constitutional architecture around the juror — qualification, disqualification, challenge, oath, deliberation, and discharge. Those concepts existed in the law but were treated as components of JURY rather than JUROR. Researchers should follow the Anderson's redirect and treat JUROR in historical sources as a gateway term pointing toward the richer JURY entries and the underlying case law.
The secondary note in Black's about "non-juror" is genuinely useful: it reminds researchers that the juror's defining legal characteristic has historically been the oath, not merely the factfinding role. This becomes relevant when examining early English legal texts where oath-refusal carried significant civil and religious consequences.
Jurisdictional Note
Juror qualification, selection procedures, and the scope of the right to a jury trial vary between federal courts, state courts, and civil versus criminal proceedings. The Sixth Amendment guarantees jury trial in serious federal criminal cases; the Seventh Amendment preserves it in federal civil cases above a threshold; state constitutional provisions vary. Researchers should not assume that doctrine developed in federal courts maps cleanly onto state court practice, particularly in historical periods before incorporation doctrine was fully developed.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Jury; Grand Jury; Voir Dire; Jury Selection and the Right to an Impartial Jury