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Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner's Book(1)
An Essay on the Trial By Jury
Literature
5.0
Excerpt: ...between the two judgments. In the civil suit, the law is declared to be obligatory upon A; in the criminal suit, the same law is declared to be of no obligation. It would be a solecism and absurdity in government to allow such consequences as these. Besides, it would be practically impossible to maintain government on such principles; for no government could enforce its civil judgments, unless it could support them by criminal ones, in case of resistance. A jury must therefore be paramount to legislation in both civil and criminal cases, or in neither. If they are paramount in neither, they are no protection to liberty. If they are paramount in both, then all legislation goes only for what it may chance to be worth in the estimation of a jury. Another reason why Magna Carta makes the discretion and consciences of juries paramount to all legislation in civilsuits, is, that if legislation were binding upon a jury, the jurors (by reason of their being unable to read, as jurors in those days were, and also by reason of many of the statutes being unwritten, or at least not so many copies written as that juries could be supplied with them) would have been necessitated at least in those courts in which the king's justices sat to take the word of those justices as to what the laws of the king really were. In other words, they would have been necessitated to take the law from the court, as jurors do now. Now there were two reasons why, as we may rationally suppose, the people did not wish juries to take their law from the king's judges. One was, that, at that day, the people probably had sense enough to see, (what we, at this day, have not sense enough to see, although we have the evidence of it every day before our eyes, ) that those judges, being dependent upon the legislative power, (the king, ) being appointed by it, paid by it, and removable by it at pleasure, would be mere tools of that power, and would hold all its legislation obligatory, whether it.
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