A civic lottery, a popular term for the contemporary use of sortition or allotment, refers to a lottery-based method for selecting citizens for public service or office. It is based on the premise that citizens in a democracy have both a duty and the desire to serve their society by participating in its governance.
Today, the most common use of the civic lottery process is found in many Anglo-Saxon judicial systems where citizen juries are summoned to hear and render verdicts in court cases. The term for this is popularly known as jury duty.
