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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

The procedure described in the article would not be legal in modern English courts. A court (probably) cannot hand out summons to people on the street. At least in England, the talesmen would have to voluntarily accept to serve on the jury, it is by invitation rather than compulsion. While courts historically did have the power to compel bystanders to serve against their will, that power has almost certainly lapsed.

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  > would have to voluntarily accept to serve on the jury, it is by invitation rather than compulsion

Jury service is compulsory in the UK.

"most people would decline a jury summons if it was voluntary, mainly for the inconvenience. Avoiding it, however, is ill advised: you cannot simply refuse and it is a criminal offence to not answer a jury summons without reasonable cause."

- https://www.law.ac.uk/resources/blog/everything-you-need-to-...

> the talesmen would have to voluntarily accept to serve on the jury, it is by invitation rather than compulsion

Of course you've remove an important qualification. Legally-speaking, you couldn't decline, but in practice since most judges recognise that a talesman is more inconvenienced than a regularly-summoned juror, it's effectively voluntary (and indeed you can decline, see this case in 2016: http://archive.today/2021.07.03-080147/https://www.thetimes....). If you were summoned normally, you haven't much of a choice.

Is there a legal basis for the jury duty selection process?

It is it just custom and the court can decide any procedure for selecting a jury pool from the population? And if so, random selection from the mall would be one such method...

Can't speak for Canada, but in the US, the jury process is a mix of black-letter law (explicit legislative acts) and administrative law (rules made by the court system under broad powers granted to it by legislation).

Tradition and precedent were the inspiration for a lot of modern law, but we explicitly re-implemented most of it via legislative and/or administrative law.

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