Self-Conscious Voir Dire

Abstract

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.