Definition
A talesman is a person summoned to serve as a juror from among the bystanders present in or around the courthouse when the regular jury panel is insufficient to complete a jury. When a full panel cannot be assembled from those originally summoned — whether through challenges, disqualifications, or failure to appear — the court may direct the sheriff or other officer to summon additional persons on the spot. These persons so summoned are talesmen. The process by which they are called is known as a tales.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone summoned to a jury when a tales is awarded, to make up numbers.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A person called to make up a deficiency in the number of jurors when a tales is awarded.
Editorial note: Unusually for a legal term, the common and legal definitions here are nearly identical in substance. The only gap worth noting is that neither common-language definition conveys the courtroom-bystander origin of the talesman — the defining feature in historical legal usage. A talesman was not drawn from a separate pool or re-summoned from the original venire; the person was, in the older practice, literally a bystander in the court who could be pressed into jury service on the day.
Common Confusion
TALESMAN vs. JUROR vs. VENIREMAN: A venireman is a person summoned in advance as part of the regular jury panel (the venire). A juror is a person who has been seated and sworn. A talesman occupies a middle position: summoned in the moment to fill a gap, but not yet sworn. The term is sometimes loosely applied to any supplemental juror, but strictly it refers only to the bystander-summoned class, as distinct from persons drawn from a supplemental panel or struck from a reserve list.
TALES vs. TALESMAN: These terms are frequently encountered together and sometimes confused. Tales refers to the legal process or the writ by which bystanders are summoned; talesman refers to the individual so summoned. Rapalje & Lawrence cross-references the entry to TALES precisely because the two concepts are inseparable: a talesman cannot exist without a tales having been awarded.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in older procedural contexts. Modern jury practice in most jurisdictions has displaced the informal bystander-summoning mechanism with formal supplemental jury pools, making talesman a largely historical term in contemporary American courts. Researchers encountering it in case law should expect it in opinions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in criminal procedure challenges where defendants argued that a talesman was improperly summoned or that the tales process was not correctly followed.
The procedural trap: because the summoning of a talesman was an exercise of court or sheriff discretion with limited formal procedure, challenges to talesman qualifications generated a body of case law on bias, competency, and the scope of voir dire as applied to this class of juror. Results were jurisdiction-specific and fact-sensitive. The Alabama and New York cases cited in Black's 2nd edition signal that appeals courts in those jurisdictions addressed the issue, but the outcomes in one state do not translate readily to another.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should search not only for "talesman" but also for "tales juror," "tales de circumstantibus" (the formal Latin phrase for the writ summoning bystanders), and "bystander juror." Pre-twentieth century reporters often used these terms interchangeably or alternated them within the same opinion.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical dictionaries converge on the same core definition: a person summoned from among the bystanders in court. The agreement is complete, and none of the three sources adds substantive qualification or nuance to the basic meaning. Black's 2nd edition is the most useful for research purposes because it supplies two case citations, providing concrete entry points into the case law. Rapalje & Lawrence's cross-reference to TALES is the more analytically useful contribution, correctly signaling that the term cannot be understood in isolation from the broader procedural mechanism that generates a talesman in the first place.
What the historical dictionaries omit: none of them addresses the qualifications or disqualifications applicable to a talesman, the scope of challenge available against one, or how the transition to formalized supplemental jury panels effectively ended the practice. A researcher relying solely on these entries would have the definition but none of the procedural context needed to work with the case law.
Jurisdictional Note
The tales procedure and the concept of the talesman originated in English common law and were transplanted into American practice, but the details of implementation varied considerably by state statute. Some states codified and retained the procedure; others abolished it by court rule or replaced it with standing supplemental pools. Federal practice under the modern Federal Rules largely renders the term obsolete in that context. When encountered in a jurisdictional opinion, the researcher should check the applicable state's jury statutes as they existed at the time of the decision.