Ethics and Batson
An interview with Prof. Peter Joy
Excluding Jurors Based on Race
The United States has a long history of racial discrimination in juries. In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which prohibited race-based discrimination in jury service. Yet, states continued to remove Black prospective jurors, by instituting vague requirements for jury service or designating prominent citizens to compile juror lists, and then shifted to excluding jurors from jury selection from around the 1960s. Despite the landmark 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky in which the Supreme Court held that the state may not use peremptory challenges to exclude jurors solely on the basis of race and set out a standard to determine whether a peremptory strike was discriminatory, the practice persists today. Legal ethics scholar Professor Peter Joy explains the Batson standard and the ways in which the framework falls short. He discusses the legal ethics of racial discrimination in jury selection and considers alternatives to peremptory challenges to combat discrimination.
About Prof. Peter Joy
Peter A. Joy is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis Law School. He teaches in legal ethics, clinical legal education, criminal justice, and trial practice. As director of the Criminal Justice Clinic, he supervises student-lawyers who provide direct legal representation to clients and work with experienced public defenders on criminal matters. Professor Joy has written extensively and presented nationally and internationally on legal ethics, lawyer and judicial professionalism, clinical legal education, and access to justice issues. He served as Vice Dean from 2010 to 2012, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs 2018-2020, and was the inaugural director of the law school’s Trial & Advocacy Program from 2002 to 2006. Professor Joy is a recipient of the Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Pincus Award for outstanding contribution to clinical legal education. He is currently on the Board of Editors for the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, and he is a columnist for the American Bar Association (ABA) quarterly publication Criminal Justice. He is a former member of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Accreditation Committee and Standards Review Committee; a former chair of the AALS Professional Responsibility Section; former chair of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education; former board member of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT); former president of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA); and former member of the Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review from 2005-2011.
