Jury duty serves not just plaintiffs and defendants, but the jurors themselves. The formalities of the adversarial legal system may be inefficient, and the shabby ambience of an urban courthouse may not reflect our esteem for the rule of law. (I spotted a television with rabbit ears in one judge’s chambers.) But the genial shtick of the clerks who explain the procedures and thank you profusely for your service made me feel like a more dutiful member of society. I even experienced a spurt of old-fashioned patriotism watching the orientation film, which begins with a costumed re-enactment of medieval trial by ordeal, continues with the late Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes” relishing the we-the-people-ness of jury duty, and includes black-and-white clips from ancient episodes of “Perry Mason.” A friend who happened into the same jury pool confessed that the video made her tear up.

My particular pool — the 30 prospective jurors interviewed by lawyers in a slip-and-fall injury case — was a classic New York ensemble: a shrink, a sports agent, a singer-dancer from a wonderful Broadway drag-queen musical, “Kinky Boots,” a few people who do things with software, a veteran of the garment district, at least one person between jobs, and one man who had to be excused because his English was not up to the task. When the plaintiff’s lawyer asked the Broadway hoofer if he or anyone close to him had been involved in any lawsuits, his droll reply set off a communal hoot of laughter: “I was in ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.’ ” A New York jury pool did not have to be told that “Spider-Man” is one of the most accident-prone and litigated productions in Broadway history.

Over the decades, juries may have become more scarce, but they have also gradually become more inclusive, in an effort to make real the constitutional promise that a jury should be selected from a population of one’s peers. In that orientation video I described, Ed Bradley reminded us that it took most of two centuries for African-Americans and then women to be allowed to serve on juries.

More recently, upper age limits have fallen away and most jurisdictions have done away with easy exemptions for V.I.P.’s. (Mayor Michael Bloomberg showed up to serve in 2007, though the gilded class seemed largely absent on the days I attended.) Paula Hannaford-Agor of the Center for Jury Studies told me New Mexico now requires that if a prospective juror speaks only Spanish or Navajo, he or she cannot be excluded but must be provided an interpreter. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California is considering whether lawyers can use their peremptory challenges to exclude gays from a jury, which has led some legal scholars to wonder whether peremptory (as opposed to for-cause) challenges should be done away with altogether.