Federal courts can no longer exclude LGBTQ+ citizens from jury duty
S. 2122 — Jury ACCESS Act of 2025 · Filed by Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) · 10 cosponsors · Introduced Jun 18, 2025 · Referred to committee
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What it does
This bill amends federal jury-service law to prohibit courts from excluding people from federal juries based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Currently, federal law bars jury exclusion based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and economic status; this bill adds sexual orientation and gender identity to that protected list, ensuring LGBTQ+ citizens cannot be systematically removed from jury duty.
Why we flagged it
The bill's sole operative mechanism is to extend existing anti-discrimination protections in federal jury service to include sexual orientation and gender identity—a straightforward civil-rights amendment with no secondary purposes or riders.
What the text implies
- Removes a potential tool for attorneys to use peremptory challenges or voir dire questioning to exclude LGBTQ+ jurors, which may shift jury composition in cases where sexual orientation or gender identity is salient to the parties or issues.
- Aligns federal jury law with state-level protections already in place in many jurisdictions, reducing a patchwork of inconsistent standards across the federal and state systems.
Section numbers refer to the bill text the analysis read — linked under Primary records below.
Who it affects
LGBTQ+ citizens gain a statutory right to equal jury service and protection against systematic exclusion based on identity. All citizens benefit from juries that are more representative and less subject to identity-based discrimination, which strengthens the legitimacy and fairness of the judicial process.
Named in the bill
Federal courts, U.S. Code Title 28, Section 1862
Where it stands
10 cosponsors: 9 Democrats, 1 Republicans.
- Jun 18, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Jun 18, 2025 — Referred to Senate Committee on the Judiciary · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
1 lobbying clients named this bill on 1 disclosure filings across 1 quarter, Jun 2026 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $223,727 in lobbying spend. A filing names 145 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 0% of bills with at least one filing.
Jeanne Shaheen, the sponsor, reported $-12,050 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- Human Rights Campaign — $223,727 on 1 filing
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 17, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (368 characters) on Sep 21, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 14,522 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Jun 2026 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 17, 2026 · page rendered 2026-09-21.
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