Definition
To labor a jury is to tamper with jurors — to attempt, through improper means, to influence their verdict or their conduct generally in a case. The term encompasses efforts to persuade, bribe, threaten, or otherwise improperly communicate with jurors outside the sanctioned trial process, including persuading jurors not to appear for service. The conduct strikes at the integrity of the jury system itself and has long been treated as a serious offense at common law and under modern statutes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Labor" means to work hard, to toil, or to exert effort toward a task. In ordinary use, to labor something is simply to work at it persistently.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Labor" is defined as physical or mental toil; exertion; effort applied to the production of something. Webster's also notes the usage "to labor a point," meaning to argue or press it with effort.
The gap between ordinary and legal meaning is not semantic reversal but contextual specialization. "To labor a jury" adopts the older sense of urging or prosecuting something with energy — pressing hard upon a person or matter — and applies it specifically to the corrupt context of working on jurors. A researcher encountering the phrase without this background might read it as neutral diligence rather than criminal misconduct. The phrase has no modern everyday counterpart, making the historical usage essential to comprehension.
Common Confusion
Do not confuse laboring a jury with jury nullification. Jury nullification occurs when jurors, acting entirely within the deliberation room, consciously return a verdict contrary to the evidence or instructions — an internal act with no external improper influence. Laboring a jury is external interference. Similarly, do not confuse this term with voir dire challenges or legitimate advocacy directed at jury composition through proper legal process. The defining feature of laboring a jury is the improper, out-of-channel nature of the contact or pressure.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively archaic in modern legal writing. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in older English common law sources, early American case reporters, colonial and early republic legal history, and the historical dictionaries themselves. Modern practice addresses the same conduct under obstruction of justice statutes, jury tampering provisions, and contempt powers — none of which use this phrase.
The Bouvier entry contains a notable historical anecdote: that the first lawyer to practice in Boston was sent back to England for laboring a jury. This detail, drawn from Washburn's Judicial History, is a useful marker for researchers tracing early American legal ethics and bar discipline. It signals that the offense was taken seriously from the earliest days of American legal practice, not merely inherited as an abstract maxim.
Researchers working in English Year Books or early common law reports should note that the cited sources — Dyer 483, Hobart 294, Coke on Littleton 157b, and the Henrician statutes — are the primary documentary record. The Coke citation in particular places this conduct within the broader framework of common law protections for the jury system.
The phrase also illustrates a broader vocabulary trap in historical legal research: terms built on common English words ("labor," "travail," "practice") that carry specialized legal meanings invisible to the modern reader. Searching historical indexes or digests under "jury tampering" or "obstruction" will not surface this term; researchers must know to look under its archaic formulation.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning: to tamper with a jury through improper influence. Bouvier's is the most substantive entry, adding the persuasion-not-to-appear dimension, the etymological grounding in "to labor a point," and the Washburn anecdote. Black's first edition is terse. The second edition of Black's contains an editorial anomaly — it appears to have incorporated a maxim entry (La ley voct plus tost suffer un mischeife que un inconvenience) in the same block, a probable typesetting error in the historical source that researchers should not treat as definitionally connected.
Bouvier's citation to 14 & 20 Hen. VII refers to English statutes from the reigns of Henry VII, placing the term's formal legal use in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This confirms the term's deep common law roots predating systematic American legal development.
None of the historical dictionaries address modern statutory equivalents or trace the phrase's disappearance from active legal usage — a gap researchers must bridge through independent doctrinal research into obstruction and jury tampering law.
Jurisdictional Note
As a term of art, "labor a jury" is not in current use in any American jurisdiction. The underlying conduct is universally prohibited but addressed through modern statutory frameworks that vary by jurisdiction in their precise definitions, penalties, and procedural mechanisms. English common law origins mean the concept was transplanted uniformly to American courts, but the vocabulary did not survive into the twentieth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Grand Jury — Fifth Amendment in Grand Jury Proceedings (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia) — for context on jury institution integrity and the constitutional framework surrounding jury proceedings.