The Green Bag
174
A good proof of the inadequacy of
our upper classes an increased distrust
human judgment of human judges is the way lawyers blunder when they
of anything so democratic as the jury
challenge jurymen. After a few weeks we men in the box get to know each
other a little; we think we have “sized up" the habits of mind of the other fellow. The lawyer often challenges the wrong man, just the man who, we think, would be on his side. Lawyers have had long experience in judging
jurymen, but they make a bad job of it. With the growing autocracy of our courts and the increasing alliance be
system. Blackstone says (I get this quotation, of course, at second-hand out of the dictionary): “A competent number of sensible and upright jurymen, chosen
by lot from among those of middle rank, will be found the best investigators of truth, and the surest guardians of public justice." Sensible and upright? Yes, but how are we to find them, unless we assume that most men are sensible and upright-as sensible and upright as other men, if not more so?
And why
tween so-called educated people, the legal system and wealth, the jury, being democratic, may fall more and more
“middle rank"? I-Iow slowly our Anglo Saxon law emerges from the class dis tinctions of
under the suspicion of our short-witted upper classes. The jury is the last element of democracy left in the courts. A movement to abolish it or control it may be expected any time. Such
movement has already been begun in a subtle way by the politicians of Alle gheny County, Pennsylvania. The ten
feudalism,
and what a
curious process is the refitting of legal inequalities bred in feudalism to the actual class distinctions of our modern commercial society!
Go out in the highways and byways and pick up a jury at random and the jury system will be safe. When any attempt is made to curtail or modify
thousand citizens whose names are on the broadest system of selection, democ the jury lists are being investigated by the authorities. Each man is, or is to be, secretly spied upon by a detective armed with an inquisitorial blank :—
Name? Address? Occupation? Age? By whom employed (a significant ques tion)? industrious? Sober? Intelligent?
Can he read and write?
Is he fair
minded (an idiotically unanswerable question)? Hearing? Physical defects?
racy had better take a look into the courts and see what is happening. Com mon men are the only kind of men that
are in this world. You cannot find twelve uncommon men in our county. There is one great advantage in the present method of making up the jury
list, which people who suspect the in telligence of jurymen do not perhaps consider.
Reputation? etc. Now, on the face of it, it may seem a good idea to subject jurymen to close examination. But exactly the same kind of scrutiny should be exercised in the
case of judges and lawyers. How would our judges pass the test? Is he fair minded? By whom employed? 1 pre dict that in the next few years more and more power will pass into the hands of the judges and that there will be among
School teachers, clergymen
and militia men are exempt. This raises the standard. Much of the foregoing profound phil osophy is of course far from the experi ences of our session of the Superior Court which sat at Mortville in and for the County of Wessex-God-save-etc. We had a pleasant little family party. Most of the cases were trifling matters —
somebody trying to get five hundred
