Definition
Select functions in law primarily as a verb and adjective describing the act or result of deliberate, formal choice from among alternatives. It appears across procedural, administrative, and constitutional contexts, usually carrying the implication that the choice is reasoned, structured, or governed by defined criteria rather than arbitrary preference.
1. As a verb (procedural): To choose from a pool or list in accordance with a prescribed method. Most commonly encountered in jury selection, forum selection, and the appointment of officers or arbitrators.
2. As an adjective (qualitative): Chosen with care; denoting a subset drawn from a larger group by reason of fitness or qualification. When courts or statutes describe a "select" body or panel, they signal that membership is not universal but filtered by some qualifying standard.
3. Selectmen (administrative): In New England and certain other states, elected town officers constituting a governing board charged with managing local public affairs. The term derives directly from the concept of being chosen or selected by the community.
4. Selecti Judices (Roman law): A panel of judges in Roman civil procedure closely analogous to a modern jury. Selected by the praetor, drawn by lot, subject to challenge, and sworn, they represent an early institutional expression of the selection principle in adjudication.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Privileged, specially selected; of high quality; top-notch.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Taken from a number by preference; picked out as more valuable or excellent than others; of special value or excellence; nicely chosen.
The common meaning emphasizes quality and exclusivity. The legal meaning emphasizes process and legitimacy — the focus is not on the superior attributes of what is chosen but on whether the method of choosing was proper, unbiased, and authorized. A "select" jury is not necessarily a superior one; it is one constituted through a legally valid procedure.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Selectmen: Plural noun designating the governing board of a New England town. Distinct from "select" used adjectivally in other legal contexts. Some jurisdictions have renamed the office "select board" or "board of selectmen" by statute.
Selecti Judices: Roman law term for the drawn and sworn panel of judges. Of historical and comparative interest; no direct modern American equivalent, though the structural parallels to jury venire and voir dire are well documented.
Forum Selection: A compound usage in modern contract and conflict-of-laws practice, designating a clause or doctrine by which parties designate the tribunal that will hear disputes. "Selection" here carries the procedural sense — a formal, binding act of choosing jurisdiction.
Why It Matters in Research
The term "select" rarely appears as a standalone headword in modern legal databases; researchers encounter it embedded in compound terms (jury selection, forum selection clause, select committee) or as a verb within procedural rules. This creates an indexing trap: searches on "select" alone will return noise; targeted searches on the compound form are essential.
Historical sources treat "select" almost entirely by cross-reference — Anderson's sends the reader to COUNCIL and SELECTMAN, Bouvier's to APPOINT and the Roman law note. Neither provides a standalone analytical definition. This means researchers using historical dictionaries to trace the concept will need to follow those cross-references carefully and not assume a bare entry under SELECT covers the full picture.
The selectmen entry is jurisdiction-specific to town-meeting states, primarily New England. Researchers working in colonial, early American, or local government history will find the term load-bearing; researchers in other contexts can safely set it aside.
The Roman law entry (Selecti Judices) is a comparative law touchstone. Blackstone's Commentaries (the 3 Bl. Com. 366 citation in Bouvier) is the bridge document connecting Roman jury-analog procedure to common law jury development. Researchers tracing the intellectual history of jury selection doctrine should note this lineage.
Forum selection as a modern usage has essentially overtaken the older senses in commercial litigation research. It is a rapidly evolved term with significant jurisdictional variation on enforceability, and corpus materials from before the 1980s will use the phrase inconsistently or not at all.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson and Bouvier converge on one point: "select" as a standalone entry carries little independent weight and functions primarily as a pointer to richer entries elsewhere. Anderson's cross-reference to COUNCIL (specifically the selectmen usage) and Bouvier's cross-reference to APPOINT (for the general act of formal choosing) together suggest that nineteenth-century legal lexicography absorbed "select" into the vocabulary of appointment and office-holding rather than treating it as a freestanding procedural concept.
Bouvier's Selecti Judices entry is the more analytically interesting of the two. By anchoring the Roman panel in Blackstone's description — returned by the praetor, drawn by lot, subject to challenge, sworn — Bouvier implicitly maps the Roman institution onto common law jury mechanics. This is historically instructive even if the mapping is imprecise. Neither dictionary addresses forum selection in any recognizable modern sense, which is expected given the era of their composition.
What the historical dictionaries miss entirely: the modern procedural and contractual senses of "selection" as a discrete doctrinal category — particularly forum selection clauses and the constitutional dimensions of jury selection under equal protection doctrine — are post-nineteenth-century developments invisible to both sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Selectmen and the select board structure are primarily a New England phenomenon, with Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire being the principal jurisdictions. Forum selection clause enforceability varies significantly; federal courts and most states follow a permissive standard after the development of modern conflict-of-laws doctrine, but specific rules on mandatory versus permissive clauses and consumer contract carve-outs differ by state.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Jury Selection — Voir Dire, Peremptory Challenges, and Batson (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Choice of Law and Forum Selection in Restrictive Covenant Disputes (The Law Mind Employment & Labor Law Encyclopedia)
Captive Insurance — Formation, Domicile Selection, and Regulatory Requirements (The Law Mind Insurance Law Encyclopedia)