Kathryn Kellner / Notes / The peremptory strike
Notes from the gallery
For fifty years, jury selection meant one skill: knowing who to remove. The law is killing that skill, state by state.
Washington constrained strikes back in 2018. Arizona went further in 2022 and ended them outright, the first state to do it. California's civil version went live in January 2026. New Jersey and Connecticut are moving.
The mechanisms differ, and to a lawyer the differences matter. Arizona ended strikes by court rule: Rules 18.4 and 18.5 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure and Rule 47(e) of the Rules of Civil Procedure, effective January 1, 2022. California used a statute: Code of Civil Procedure section 231.7, which reached criminal trials in 2022 and all civil cases in January 2026, with presumptively invalid strike categories tested against an objective observer aware of unconscious bias. Washington's General Rule 37, from 2018, is the template the reform states copied, with a developed body of case law behind it. In New Jersey, the post-Andujar jury reforms are underway; in Connecticut, the Jury Selection Task Force work that followed State v. Holmes.
What's left when you can't strike? Reading the panel. Discovering bias through conversation. Reaching the twelve people you're given.
Where strikes are limited or gone, the remaining levers in jury selection are lawful ones: the quality of the questions, the reading of communication in the room, and cause-challenge advocacy built from what jurors actually say and do. Those are skills, and they are trainable.
Removal was a strategy. Reading is a skill. And almost nobody teaches it.