Legal Definitions - blue ribbon jury

A blue ribbon jury is a type of special jury that is made up of specially qualified jurors. These jurors are selected from a special list, rather than the general jury pool. Blue ribbon juries were used for particularly complex or exceptional cases.

For example, if a case involved a complicated scientific or technical issue, a blue ribbon jury might be used to ensure that the jurors had the necessary expertise to understand the evidence presented.

However, the use of blue ribbon juries has been criticized for creating juries that are disproportionately composed of social and economic elites. Some have argued that this conflicts with the constitutional requirement that juries be impartially drawn from a cross-section of the community.

The question of whether blue ribbon juries are constitutional was addressed by the United States Supreme Court in Fay v. New York. The Court narrowly upheld New York's then-existing blue ribbon jury statute, but Justice Murphy noted in his dissent that the use of blue ribbon juries conflicts with the constitutional requirement of impartiality.

While blue ribbon juries are now obsolete, some states still allow for the use of other types of special juries in complex cases. For example, Delaware allows for special juries in complex civil cases.