Do you have 1 hour (often less!) per week to adopt a state to keep tabs on from the comfort of your computer?
Each week I'll email you a short assignment with instructions. For your convenience, I will have links on the FIJA website to your adopted state's legislative and judicial branches, U.S. district courts in your state, the state legal code and constitution, and the rules of criminal and civil procedure. Those will be the main sources for everything we are doing.
Your task for the week might be to search on a legislative website for specific search terms and find out what jury-related bills are in play so we can alert FIJA supporters about underhanded moves in their state. Or you might be checking administrative orders on a court website to monitor the changing status of criminal, civil, or grand juries as the year progresses. Perhaps you will be gathering data on how long speedy trial deadlines have been suspended so we can assemble a dataset to share with media, policymakers, academic researchers, and the general public.
Don't worry! Each week will come with instructions walking you through the task, and I will be available via email to help you if you get stuck or on group Zoom sessions if something turns out to be challenging for many people. But I'm pretty sure most of these things will quickly seem mundane.
I have done and will continue to do these things right along with you, so I can tell you that these will often take just a few minutes. An hour a week would be the upper limit on the expected time commitment. The main problem for me is that I am just one person, and there are 50 states and about 100 U.S. District Courts that need to be monitored. It's just not feasible for one person to do this alone.
To participate, just hit Reply and let me know via email your top three choices for a state to adopt and I'll assign you one of them. Starting in January, you'll be getting weekly assignments via email for your assigned state.
I look forward to hearing back from you, and will do my best to assign you one of your preferred states. If someone has already adopted your choice, I hope you will be willing to show some love by adopting another state!
