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What does halacha say about avoiding jury duty?
Where I live, juries in civil and criminal trials are made up of ordinary citizens, who are summoned for this purpose ("jury duty"). Being judged by a jury of impartial "regular people" (not judges, not lawyers, etc) is an important part of the (US) justice system. If everybody avoided jury duty the system would break down. On the other hand, there are more eligible jurors than are actually needed, most of the time.
If you are randomly selected for jury duty you're required to serve, and possibly be seated on a jury, unless you can demonstrate a significant hardship. Jury candidates are usually asked questions by lawyers for both sides and/or the presiding judge. Jury candidates must affirm that they will tell the truth. Some of these questions are pretty subjective ("do you feel you could be fair under such-and-such conditions", etc). Giving the "wrong" answers generally leads to you not being chosen.
Some people try to avoid being seated on a jury, usually because it's inconvenient. I assume that outright lying about either hardship or impartiality would be a problem halachically. But we can sometimes tell ourselves little half-truths that might or might not count as lying -- I'd like to get out of jury duty, so maybe I would resent being stuck on the jury and that would affect my ability to judge the case fairly, and therefore I can say "no I can't be impartial".
On the other hand, perhaps we owe a duty to our fellow citizens as part of establishing systems of justice or even וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ (Vayikra 19:18). When summoned I always go and hope to be selected, because if the situation were reversed I would want people like me to be rendering judgement.
This article from Din Online considers the question of whether serving on a jury is permitted at all, and concludes that it is so long as the litigants are not Jews. My question is related but different: what does halacha say about avoiding jury duty in a case where it is permitted? Is it permissible to dodge participating in the court system? Contrariwise, is there any sort of obligation to participate, and dodging would be forbidden? I am not asking about deferring service (for example to avoid yom tov), but about dodging it entirely.
I asked this question several years ago elsewhere, and received a response about a similar case of evading army service. The response there was that one should not do so because it would make Jews look bad -- "for the enemies of the Jews say that the Jews do not obey the government's laws". But dodging years of army service is on a different scale (and possibly different visibility) from dodging one day of going to the courthouse, and also we have a halachic obligation about establishing justice but not about joining the army, so I don't know if that discussion is relevant.
Is avoiding jury duty permitted, forbidden, or required?
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