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by CyberFonic 3728 days ago
Have you researched different jurisdictions? I am dismayed that the lawyers would be given so much information about potential jurors a week in advance. Seems to run counter to the idea that jurors are selected from "peers".

Technically, you would be doing a lot of site scraping and that would take a sizeable investment in development. Of course, assuming that you don't first need to enter the details from hardcopy. Even if you get the information in electronic form, it will probably be different for different courts, states, etc.

2 comments

Yes and they vary drastically. Federal courts use the same jury pool for two years, while a local court could be as little as two weeks.

Attorneys/secretaries/paralegals already do this by hand. More than scraping I'm hoping to do something useful with what they already scrape manually. By giving them a platform that make it easy to share their notes and info about jurors I should be able to start using this information.

The "peers" part of "a jury of one's peers" is widely misunderstood.

It is a remnant of the medieval legal distinction between nobles and commoners. It simply means that nobles can only be tried by a jury of other nobles, and commoners can only be tried by a jury of other commoners.