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8 Int'l J. Semiotics L. 3 (1995)

handle is hein.journals/intjsemi8 and id is 1 raw text is: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Vo.VIII no.22 [19951 THE MANHATTAN JUROR AS LOCAL TOURIST by JOHN OSBURN Vassar College, New York In late August and early September of 1992, I spent about two weeks as a juror in the county courts of Lower Manhattan. In March of the following year, I returned to the site of my earlier service to more fully examine what previously had struck me as the essentially touristic quality of the experience. It was as though tourism was a recognizable pattern that was effortlessly fallen into during an activity that lacked a fully ar- ticulated structure of its own. That tourism was a clear, if submerged, aspect of the experience was, as it were, given public confirmation a few months later when the New York Times (reflecting a heightened interest in the subject since the call - up of thousands of citizens for the World Trade Centre bombing trial) published When Jury Duty Calls: They Also Serve Who Sit and Wait, and Lunch and Shop and Read and Flirt. The four pages of articles and sidebars explicitly mimicked a travel-section spread, complete with sug - gested eating spots, recommendations for leisure reading, and one box of activities entitled Acting Like a Tourist Close to Home.1 The superficial parallels between tourism and the jury selection pro- cess in Manhattan are easy to sketch out. One sees an instructional video narrated by a famous actress, meets and develops relationships with strangers (as though at a hotel lounge or in the dining car of a train), and enjoys a rare opportunity to see how the system works, all while taking time off from work. The juror is even provided with a book of self-guided walking tours of historic sites near the courthouse! This essay explores the touristic structures and representations of jury duty on the assumption that such connections do not arise by chance but reflect deep, if fortuitous, affinities between apparently unre- lated social forms within a common culture. Fortuity has been an im - portant organizing principle in developing my argument. In the case of 1 New York Times, 10 October 1993, Sec. 13, 1, 12-15.

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