Abstract: The research subject is the rule of closed procedure of the preparatory part of court proceedings at the stage of the jury formation. The author studies legal regulation of this sphere in the Criminal Procedure Code of Russia, the RSFSR and legislation of foreign countries (the USA and Spain), and the judicial practice of realization of this rule according to the Criminal Procedure Code of Russia and the RSFSR. The article analyzes the procedure of formation of the jury from the position of the need to close it to protect the rights and freedoms of the parties guaranteed by the Constitution, and to guarantee the legality and feasibility of the judicial decision. The research is based on the dialectical method. Besides, the author uses the formal-legal, historical-legal and comparative-legal methods. The author concludes that the legislator has established unreasonably wide limits of the principle of publicity for the jury formation. The protection of the values, guaranteed by the Constitution of Russia (private life, personal and family secrets, life and health of the jury candidates), doesn’t require closing the jury formation procedure in all criminal cases. The author offers excluding part 23 from the article 328 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Russia. The current version of the article 241 of the Code allows the court to decide to close the part of the proceedings, which is connected with legally protected information, in the context of a particular situation. Using the practice, which has formed by 2002, it is reasonable to provide for the possibility not to put the public out of court, but to offer the interested parties to approach the presiding judge and to deliver questions and answers with such strength of tone for other persons, who are not the parties to the proceedings, not to hear them.