This article examines the role of lay decision-makers in American prosecutors' case preparation. Drawing on ethnographic research, it focuses on the creative and collaborative process by which prosecutors develop and revise opening and closing statements for trial. I argue in Part I that these narratives are keyed to perspectives that prosecutors attribute to hypothetical jurors. Part II focuses on the relationship prosecutors articulate between particular narrative techniques and jurors' perceptions of their character and evidence. The central empirical finding is that prosecutors formulate and negotiate narratives about their cases with continual reference to jurors' potential interpretations of them. This interactional process of critique and revision reveals the contingent and reflexive nature of prosecutorial discretion. It also offers a window into the social knowledge that prosecutors draw on to anticipate how jurors might scrutinize their work.

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The purpose of this article is to explore perceptions and assessments of lay participation in Norway during a historic time of transition away from all‐layperson juries. This study consisted of sixteen months of court observation and interviews with judges, prosecutors, former lay decision makers, defense attorneys, and other contributors to the country's longstanding jury debate. My ethnographic research demonstrates that all‐layperson juries in Norway face practical and procedural checks that differentiate them from Anglo‐American juries, among others. For this reason, legal professionals in Norway evince confidence that mixed courts of lay and professional citizens can facilitate fair case outcomes. A central finding from this research is that comparative analyses of all‐layperson juries and mixed courts require attention to the social specificity of the states that support such systems. To this end, lay participation in Norway challenges the conventional wisdom that jurors have greater independence and control over case outcomes than lay judges.

Ask a federal prosecutor to describe an average day at work, and chances are they will not mention a jury trial. Yet when prosecutors talk about how they do their jobs and what their jobs mean to them, jurors seem to be everywhere. It is the figure and role of this imagined juror in the professional lives of prosecutors that is the subject of this book. Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of federal prosecutors, The Imagined Juror explores this paradoxical feature of the federal legal landscape: though laypeople participate in federal trials infrequently, hypothetical jurors loom large in the decision-making and professional imagination of some of our most powerful legal actors. Through imagining jurors, prosecutors discover a critical resource for making sense of their ill-defined directives to seek justice and represent the United States. They also find a way of discussing mercy, acknowledging evolving community mores, and discovering themselves as moral actors rather than line attorneys carrying out supervisors’ directives. At the same time, the book highlights the limitation of a legal system where jurors are primarily imaginary, calling for reforms that would foster a more inclusive and effective American jury.

This chapter examines how prosecutors invoke hypothetical jurors in preparation for anticipated jury selection proceedings. Even when prosecutors are given the rare opportunity to directly interact with lay decision-makers during voir dire, jurors furnish relatively little information in court and thus remain elusive and unpredictable actors. A vital function of the lawyers’ assessments of prospective jurors during their empanelment, the chapter argues, is the opening they create for prosecutors to explicitly define and assert the parameters of their own professional and ethical identities. Once more, it is the figure of the imagined juror that provides the means to concretize an otherwise ambiguous understanding of what it means to be a good prosecutor.