I'd like to attend a live jury trial, purely as a spectator. I live in Santa Clara County, California. If I look at the Court calendar, there is no quick way to find what's coming up. Just the opposite: you have to pick a day and then see what's scheduled that day. For every district in the court.
How can I efficiently research when upcoming jury trials are scheduled?
Short Answer
How can I efficiently research when upcoming jury trials are scheduled?
Usually you can't. But this varies considerably, even from courthouse to courthouse within the same judicial system.
If you can't find it in Santa Clara County, California, this is probably because no such system that is available to the general public exists.
Usually, longer jury trials start jury selection on a Monday morning and start in earnest later that day or on a Tuesday, and if they will take multiple weeks, often take every other Friday off so that jurors can attend to their personal business.
If you come into the courthouse at random to observe educationally, a security guard or bystander in the security line will often be willing to tell you if they know of any jury trials that are going on that day.
Long Answer
While I don't know the exact situation in Santa Clara County in California, the usual situation in most U.S. trial courts is that there is no central index of jury trials, and you have to search day by day in each court's schedule. Also, often, publicly available schedules don't distinguish between hearings, status conferences, oral arguments on motions, bench trials, and jury trials. Some particular judges, however, often will reserve one day a week for short hearings on pending motions.
The most centralized systems I have seen have a screen somewhat like an airport arrivals and departures screen, for the current day, that lists when hearings of any kind are to be held by courtroom, sometimes by judge, and by the parties to the case, at that location. This is generated only for the current day and is not always available online.
This information is also very fluid. A typically courtroom will add and remove hearings (only a minority of which are jury trials) from its calendar multiple times in a typical day (although some primarily schedule hearings and trials only once or twice a week with no consistency among judges in the same building).
Some kinds of case filings result in an automatic setting of a hearing without court involvement (e.g. return dates in eviction cases and first appearances in many kinds of criminal cases). And, when a case that is set for trial is settled (or resolved by a plea bargain agreement), the courtroom where the case is scheduled to be heard is typically notified within hours and the courtroom's scheduled is adjusted accordingly. It also isn't particularly uncommon for there to be a settlement of a case "on the courtroom steps" so to speak, either immediately before the scheduled trial, or even in the middle of a multi-day trial itself (e.g. if unexpected testimony has a decisive impact on the likely outcome of the trial). Lawyers and judges also try to be conservative in estimating how long it will take to conduct a trial when it is scheduled, and sometimes trials are concluded before the time allocated for them on a court calendar ends.
The available information for each individual case (sometimes available to the general public, and sometimes only to parties and lawyers in the case), however, usually has a schedule with more detailed explanations, either from a list of recent notices of hearing in the list of court documents filed, from a schedule of events in the case, or both. The judge will have a full list that can be used to scheduled that judge's new hearings and trials over a long period of time, but that list often isn't available to the public.
As recently as maybe five or ten years ago, I've been before judges who don't have any electronic list of hearings and trials and maintain that solely on a paper calendar. I once had a case whose trial in the following year couldn't be scheduled for the following year because delivery of the following year's stationary had been delayed by a delay in having the judicial branch's budget for the following year approved.
Footnote Regarding Notices of Special Closures And Cancellations
In addition to these points, there is usually a website, either at the state level, or the county level, or both, that announce total closures of a courthouse location.
In Colorado, it looks like this:
In that case, the small rural courthouse in question was partially destroyed in a fire, and it will take many months to rebuild it, so all cases have been relocated to a nearby fire station until further notice.
FUN FACT: In the first few decades that Colorado was a state (in the late 1800s), most trials outside major cities were conducted in saloons because court houses hadn't been built yet, and judges literally rode circuit in horses and carriages from saloon to saloon, often together with the trial lawyers and prosecutors in the circuit, to conduct trials. This was common practice during frontier periods throughout the Midwest and West of the United States.
Similarly, last Friday, the same website had this notice:
This can be due, for example, to severe weather, wildfires, floods, problems with the main roads and bridges to the courthouse, a pandemic lockdown, bomb threats, a major breakdown of the plumbing, HVAC, or electrical systems in the building, a mass shooting, a special holiday that isn't in the court rules like a state judiciary branch centennial celebration, or a judicial conference affecting multiple judges at the same location.
I was in court on September 11, 2001, for example, and a public announcement was made a few minutes after I was done with my business there for the day to cancel all pending hearings and trials, starting about 11 a.m. on that day, that continued for several days thereafter.
Sometimes the same system will announce a cancelation of all hearings before a particular judge, for example, due to the death of the judge, or a personal health matter for the judge such as a sick day, or a personal emergency for the judge such as a death in the judge's family or the arrest of the judge for a crime.
