Definition
The process of selecting a jury by eliminating names from a prepared panel until the required number of jurors remains. In its classic form — and the sense most closely associated with the term — striking a jury refers specifically to the method used to constitute a special jury: a larger-than-normal panel (historically forty-eight names) is assembled by the court officer, and each party then alternately removes a fixed number of names until twelve remain. The jurors who survive this elimination process are said to form a "struck jury."
More broadly, the term is also used to describe any act of removing a prospective juror from a panel, including the exercise of peremptory challenges or challenges for cause in ordinary jury selection. In this looser sense, an attorney "strikes" a juror by removing them from consideration.
Common Confusion
STRIKING A JURY is sometimes used interchangeably with VOIR DIRE or jury selection generally, but the terms describe different things. Voir dire is the examination process by which prospective jurors are questioned; striking is the act of removal that follows or accompanies that examination. The historic meaning of striking a jury — the formal struck-jury method involving a prepared list and alternating eliminations — is more procedurally specific than the casual modern usage of "striking" a juror during ordinary empanelment. Researchers encountering the term in older sources should assume the specialized struck-jury procedure unless context indicates otherwise.
Why It Matters in Research
The term carries two distinct procedural meanings across time, and conflating them produces research errors. In sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "striking a jury" almost always refers to the formal struck-jury mechanism for constituting a special jury — a procedure with its own rules, officers, and panel size. In modern American practice, the phrase more often appears informally to mean any removal of a juror by counsel, typically through peremptory challenge. A researcher reading an early treatise who assumes the modern casual meaning will misunderstand the procedure being described.
The struck-jury method has largely disappeared from American practice. Burrill's entry notes that Chancellor Kent and Professor Greenleaf both considered the procedure "exploded" even by their era — making it a historical artifact in the U.S. long before the twentieth century. English practice retained elements of it longer. Researchers tracing the history of special juries or jury reform will find this term concentrated in sources predating the mid-nineteenth century in American jurisdictions, and somewhat later in English materials.
The forty-eight-name panel figure is consistent across the historical dictionaries and is a useful confirmation signal: if a primary source refers to a panel of forty-eight and alternating strikes, the struck-jury method is being described. Different panel sizes suggest either a variant procedure or a different jurisdiction's adaptation.
Cross-corpus connections: researchers working on the history of grand jury selection or the constitutional dimensions of peremptory challenges will find this term adjacent to, but distinct from, those bodies of law. The struck-jury method was a civil and criminal trial procedure; it does not appear in grand jury empanelment. For modern peremptory challenge doctrine, the relevant research thread runs through equal protection constraints, not the historical struck-jury mechanism.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on the core mechanics: a panel (forty-eight names in Black's 2nd Ed. and Bouvier's) is prepared by a court officer, each side removes a fixed number of names, and the remainder constitutes the jury. Black's first edition is truncated but consistent with the others. Bouvier adds procedural texture specific to English practice — the sheriff attends with the book of freeholders, the prothonotaries or proper officers manage the list, and attorneys for each side strike twelve names respectively, yielding the twelve who serve.
Burrill's entry is the most analytically useful of the four. It identifies the procedure as the "peculiar mode of constituting a special jury" and, crucially, transmits the Kent and Greenleaf assessment that the method was already considered obsolete in American practice by the time Burrill was writing. This is a significant historiographical marker: the procedure's disappearance from American practice was noted by leading jurists in the nineteenth century, yet it continued to appear in legal dictionaries as a reference point for historical and comparative purposes.
None of the historical sources address the modern casual usage of "striking" a juror. That usage is a later development and is absent from the dictionary record entirely for this term.
Jurisdictional Note
The struck-jury method described in these sources reflects English and early American practice. It is not in active use in American federal or state courts today. Some jurisdictions retain statutory references to struck-jury procedures for specialized contexts, but researchers should treat the historical sources as describing a procedure that had effectively passed from American practice by the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Grand Jury — Fifth Amendment in Grand Jury Proceedings (criminal_169); Mistrial and Hung Jury (criminal_212)