June 26, 2026
By: Randy Jordan & Chris Jordan, as published by The Hill
A few years ago, we spent five and a half weeks in a Glynn County, Georgia courtroom trying one of the most emotionally charged cases either of us had ever seen. Twenty-one plaintiffs, mostly children of opioid addicts, had sued our client under Georgia’s Drug Dealer Liability Act.
The human stories were devastating. Neglectful parents, some dead of overdoses. Lives genuinely destroyed. It was the first case of its kind in the country, and everyone was watching to see what a jury would do.
Twelve ordinary people from coastal Georgia deliberated for nearly two days. Then they came back and found our client not liable on every count. The Supreme Court of Georgia later affirmed the verdict unanimously.
We are not telling this story to relitigate the case. We are telling it because of what that jury had to do. They had to sit with grief-stricken families for weeks and still follow the law. They had to resist an emotionally overpowering narrative on one of the most charged subjects in American life and ask instead: Does the evidence actually support this claim? They got it right. Not our version of right — the Supreme Court of Georgia’s version of right.
We have tried well over a hundred jury cases between us. What we have never seen is a jury that didn’t take the responsibility seriously. Ordinary people, called away from their jobs and families, handed a case they didn’t ask for, almost always rise to it. Juries are not perfect. But they are serious, in a way that a lot of American public life no longer is.
That seriousness matters right now. Gallup reported in 2024 that confidence in the judicial system had fallen to a record-low 35 percent, part of a broader collapse that also reaches Congress and the presidency. And yet Americans who say they distrust institutions are often the same people looking for every excuse to get out of serving on the one that still belongs, in a very real sense, to them.
That contradiction is worth sitting with as America turns 250 this summer.
Jury service is one of the few democratic duties that still puts ordinary citizens directly in charge — not elected officials, not academic experts, not social media influencers.
The jury box is one of the few places in modern American life where citizens are asked to do something genuinely difficult together: listen to competing claims, weigh facts over cheap slogans, deliberate with people they did not choose, and reach a judgment that carries life-altering consequences for another human being. It asks citizens not merely to criticize the system from a distance, but to enter it, participate in it and accept the burden of judgment. That is not symbolic citizenship or performance, but actual citizenship in practice.
In most of American life, people sort themselves. We choose our news, our communities, our politics and often our facts. Disagreement has become something to mute, unfollow or scroll past.
The jury system cuts against all of that.
It places citizens alongside strangers from different neighborhoods, backgrounds and beliefs and asks them to submit to a common set of rules. It demands patience, attention and the humility to follow evidence where it leads rather than where identity or our instinctual biases would prefer it to go. There is almost nothing else in American civic life that still asks this of us.
Jury service is inconvenient and often financially disruptive for working people, and courts should keep working to make it more accessible. But the burden is not an argument for skipping it. It is part of the point. Our Founders gave ordinary citizens a direct role in the administration of justice because they understood that self-government is a practice, not something inherited.
Americans are comfortable talking about rights. We are less comfortable talking about duties and actually doing them. Our model of constitutional government depends on both.
So much of public life now feels remote, curated and frankly, performative. We argue across social media platforms optimized for outrage and feel like we have participated in democracy. The jury room is nothing like that. It is serious and unscripted. It makes people stay in disagreement until they have done something honest with it. In a country as polarized as this one, that may be one of the most valuable civic experiences we have left.
Anniversaries are easy, and they don’t come often. Citizenship is harder. A republic cannot survive solely on patriotic language. It survives when everyday people accept the disciplines that liberty requires of us.
Jury duty is one of them. Stop treating it as something to escape. It is the last place where democratic responsibility is still real, and where ordinary Americans are still trusted to get it right.
In our experience, they usually do.
Randy Jordan and Chris Jordan are trial lawyers at HunterMaclean in Savannah, Georgia. As co-lead counsel in Poppell v. McKesson, they won the first opioid verdict in the country brought by private citizens. The Supreme Court of Georgia unanimously affirmed.
