For four weeks last spring — three hours a day, five days a week — I served, along with twenty-two other New York County residents, as a member of a grand jury. We met each morning on a high floor in the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street and performed our role as a minor procedural hurdle to one or another of Manhattan’s 500 assistant district attorneys. Very few of the lawyers carried bags or briefcases, so they invariably seemed on the verge of slapstick catastrophe as they schlepped and stacked their distended accordion folders of material evidence and annotated statutes,…