Chapter 1 sets the stage for the challenge that the American jury system faces. Citizens receive a jury summons requiring them to appear in court. They are often dismayed when they receive their summons. Those who heed it often do so reluctantly. The traditional view of the summons is that it is just an isolated step designed to bring a sufficient number of prospective jurors to the courthouse. The transformation view, however, is that the experience of receiving a summons and going to the courthouse are unusual events that begin to transform the outlook and behavior of those who are ultimately selected as jurors. Even at this early stage of the jury process, there are steps that courts can take to assist in the transformation of citizens into jurors. They can design summonses that are written clearly, provide answers to frequently asked questions, and reassure citizens that they do not need any special knowledge to serve as jurors. The summons, which courts view mainly as a vehicle to bring citizens to the courthouse, should instead be viewed as a form of outreach that begins the transformation of citizens into responsible jurors.

A polite social order emerged out of significant demographic, economic, and political changes in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and was established according to novel ideas about personal virtue, piety, and white masculinity. Members of an exclusive merchant elite embraced new models of personal deportment and constructed physical spaces, both public and domestic, in which to practice and display their gentility. Shared values, including an ethos of polite speech, united this elite and linked them with their English counterparts. Polite speech was explicated in conduct and courtesy books, in popular periodicals, in personal conversation with fellow gentlemen – and as distinct from vulgar speech, increasingly associated with particular types of people. Linguistic and social hierarchies proved to be mutually reinforcing, and, for the genteel, it was increasingly impolite (not ungodly or sinful) speech that posed the greater threat to good social order or “the peace.” That new social order would be enforced and enacted through law, the statutes, and procedures by which impolite speech was criminalized, prosecuted, and punished.

Lay participation in state judicial procedures has been championed, in Argentina and elsewhere, as embodying new ways of making justice – imbued with the experiences and sentiments of ordinary people and carrying into courthouses the quotidien’s romance of commonsensical authenticity and candidness. Research on law and the everyday, however, has paid little attention to ordinary citizens serving as jurors. The negative constitution of the everyday against state law situates jurors and their courthouse experiences at the other extreme of the continuum, delinked from everyday sites and practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the province of Córdoba, this chapter discusses ‘everyday justice’ from the empirical vantage point of the recent incorporation of lay decision-makers to the historically professional-only Argentine criminal justice system. The discussion follows jurors as they enter courthouses and as multiple authorities attempt to govern their presence, role, and status therein. The resulting enmeshment of formal and informal practices, I argue, reinforces jurors’ alterity vis-à-vis legal professionals, their postures, and modes of conduct, solidifying the implied ‘law vs. everyday’ divide. The chapter suggests that it may be fruitful to investigate this very divide not as ontologically given, but as an effect of multi-scalar governance attempts in discrete times and spaces.