Robbins: Venue, venire, and voir dire
First, you have to get there, the “there” in this case being the particular courthouse.
Think of venue as “place.” It is the GPS pinpoint on the Google map of the law.
Venue deals with the physical locality in which a suit will be prosecuted, the county in which the trial will transpire. The term derives from the Latin word for “a place where people gather.” If, for one reason or another, there is a change in venue (more common in high-profile criminal matters than in civil matters), the trial team will most times stay the same. The trial will simply be shipped, part and parcel, to another locality with all the chess pieces of the litigation still intact. The only substantive difference will be to whom and where the case is tried.
Although our subject resonates with V’s, it is worth a short detour to understand the difference between venue and “jurisdiction.” Jurisdiction refers to those matters that a particular court has the authority and is competent to adjudicate. Bankruptcy courts, for example, have the limited authority to deal with … you guessed it … bankruptcy matters. Water courts (yes, in Colorado, where water is as precious as rare metals, there are water courts), deal, literally, with ebbs and flows. Juvenile courts deal with, um … juvenile matters. And so on.
Jurisdiction, then, is the ambit of those matters a particular court has the scope and authority to consider, while venue is the physical place where the consideration of a matter will take place. And, as you might imagine, there’s an “app” for that. More properly, there are statutes relating to what court is the proper one within which to bring an action, statutes that dictate the proper venue.
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That settled, what about “venire?”
Venire means, literally, “to come; to appear in court.” While sounding suspiciously similar to “a place where people gather” (i.e., the Latin meaning of venue”), there is subtle but meaningful difference. Venire has more to do with obeying a command; one is commanded to appear before the court.
Most commonly, the command one is to follow is in the form of being summoned for potential jury duty to create a pool or panel of persons from which a jury is chosen. It may, however, also refer to “venire facias” (a Latin term meaning “may you cause to come”), the written command a judge issues to a sheriff to summon prospective jurors.
A “venireman” is a member of a panel of jurors, summoned by a writ of venire facias.
Rather than moving a trial by a change of venue, the court may instead deal with potential prejudice by issuing a writ of venire facias. In such a case, rather than moving the trial to a new location, by a writ of venire facias, the court may move the jury to the trial. In place of exporting the trial to, say, Denver, veniremen (say from Denver) could be imported to sit as jurors in Eagle County.
The third, related concept is “voir dire.” Voir dire has several meanings depending on the context. Literally, “voir dire” means “to speak the truth.” Courts and lawyers often use it as a verb, as in, “Counsel, you may proceed to voir dire the potential juror.” One can voir dire a witness or voir dire a potential juror.
In voir diring a potential witness, the juror may be “examined” (that is, questioned) for potential prejudice. Voir diring potential jurors before empaneling them (that is, seating or “qualifying” them as a juror in the matter under consideration) is the normal course in any jury trial.
Before being accepted as a juror, the judge or the attorneys for both sides, or sometimes both, are entitled to examine or question the potential juror as to his or her beliefs, competency, interests, prejudices, knowledge or perception of the facts under consideration, intimacy or knowledge of the parties and attorneys or any other relevant (and, often what appears to be largely irrelevant) matter. Anyone who has sat on a jury knows that before he or she is seated, s/he is questioned as to certain matters of belief and background.
In voir diring a witness, the hope and presumption is that people will “speak the truth,” that they will be fair and open about their prejudices and predispositions. And even if they’re not, by exploring their background and their interests, the truth will nonetheless emerge. By the device of voir dire, the hope is that prejudice and predisposition can be eliminated from the proceedings and that fairness and impartiality will reign.
In sum, let us gather at this place (venue), let us do so as we are so commanded by the court (venire), then let’s explore and hopefully eliminate prejudices and predispositions before proceeding to the trial of the particular matter (voir dire). And, in so doing, the hope and expectation is that justice will impartially be served.
Rohn K. Robbins is an attorney licensed before the Bars of Colorado and California who practices in the Vail Valley with the Law Firm of Caplan & Earnest, LLC. His practice areas include business and commercial transactions; real estate and development; family law, custody, and divorce; and civil litigation. Robbins may be reached at 970-926-4461 or Rrobbins@CELaw.com. His novels, “How to Raise a Shark (an apocryphal tale),” “The Stone Minder’s Daughter,” “Why I Walk so Slow” and “He Said They Came From Mars (stories from the edge of the legal universe)” and “The Theory of Dancing Mice” are currently available at fine booksellers.
