Hannah, we love civics. It's our job. It's what we do. It's at the core of our very

being. And part of the core of the very being of civics itself is jury duty.

Yeah, I agree. I feel like it is one of the ultimate civics duties.

So in this episode, we are hoping to help you. The listener understand why you too should

be fired up at the mere possibility of serving on a jury. And I'm not talking about the

reason that Stanley from the office wanted to do it.

I have been trying to get on jury duty every single year since I was 18 years old. To

get to go sit in an air conditioned room downtown, judging people, or my lunch was paid

for, that is the life. So Hannah, when we played that clip for our guest, Professor

Sinaly Chokravarti, and Professor of government at Wesleyan University, did she roll her

eyes about all the jury jokes? Give a lecture about how participating on a jury is a thing

to be taken seriously? No, her first reaction was to crack a joke too. One that she says

was quite popular after the O.J. Simpson trial, which is I never want to be judged by 12

people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. Oh wow, that's rough. That's

not that if you're not smart enough to get out of a jury, I don't want you on mine.

Absolutely. However, Professor Chokravarti even mentioning that, that trial inspired jokes

and lots of conversations about jury duty, there were reasons for that. In part, because

O.J. Simpson was a huge celebrity, a former NFL player who'd become an actor and a TV commentator

when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman in 1994.

Yeah, and I know details about the case were all over the news at the time. It spurred

a national conversation about how racial bias could influence the trial. And there was

widespread TV coverage, millions of Americans watched an infamous car chase of O.J. Simpson

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