Outdated and Unconstitutional: Rethinking Duration of Residency Requirements for Jury Service examines a largely overlooked defect in the jury system: laws that categorically exclude new residents from serving on juries. The article argues that one-year residency requirements for federal juries and juries in a small number of states are rooted in outdated assumptions about community attachment and juror competence, lack meaningful empirical support, and undermine the constitutional promise of an impartial jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. It combines constitutional analysis with empirical evidence to show that these exclusions affect a substantial share of the population, weaken jury representativeness, and should be reconsidered under more demanding constitutional standards.

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What problem the article addresses

The article focuses on a structural feature of jury selection that often escapes serious scrutiny: the rule that a person must have lived in the summoning jurisdiction for a fixed period—typically one year—before becoming eligible for jury service. Edwards argues that this rule excludes a significant group of otherwise qualified citizens from participation in one of the legal system’s most important democratic institutions. According to the article, one-year residency requirements remain in effect for federal juries and in five states, and they exclude roughly five percent of the population from jury service.

The article treats this as more than a technical administrative question. It argues that categorical exclusion of new residents affects both the defendant’s right to an impartial jury and the broader legitimacy of the jury system. A jury is supposed to reflect a fair cross-section of the community, and that principle is undermined when the state excludes a substantial group based on assumptions that are unsupported, contradictory, or outdated.

What the article argues

The article’s central claim is that one-year residency requirements are unconstitutional because categorical exclusions from jury service should be narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests. Edwards argues that courts have too often reviewed these laws under undemanding and outdated reasoning from the 1970s, rather than asking whether excluding new residents is actually necessary to obtain impartial and competent jurors.

A key part of the article is its distinction between two kinds of jury-selection problems. Some claims involve direct governmental exclusion of a group from jury service. Other claims involve underrepresentation caused by the mechanics of the selection system. Edwards argues that these are not the same problem and should not be collapsed into the same doctrinal framework. If the state itself categorically excludes new residents, the proper constitutional question is whether that exclusion is justified at all; only after such exclusions are removed does it make sense to evaluate whether the resulting jury pool still underrepresents new residents under a case like Duren v. Missouri.

The article also argues that the traditional justifications for the exclusion are weak. The claim that new residents are unfamiliar with community values, norms, and conditions rests on assumptions that are neither tested nor persuasive in modern jury systems. Edwards contends that the rule is a relic of an earlier era, when jurors were handpicked based on reputation in the community rather than selected through modern source lists and administrative systems.

What the empirical evidence shows

A major strength of the article is that it does not stop with doctrinal criticism. It offers empirical evidence testing the assumptions behind the exclusion.

One concrete example comes from Edwards’s analysis of the 2020 American National Election Study (ANES). The article reports that people who had lived in their current community for less than a year showed no statistically significant difference from longer-term residents in political understanding, attendance at community meetings, contacting local officials, turnout, or going to political meetings. The article also notes that new residents were more likely to join a march or demonstration and more likely to do volunteer work. In other words, the available data did not support the idea that new residents are less informed,