In Praise of Juries
Recently I have been reading a lot of history about the founding of our nation and the decades following the ratification of the Constitution. In my reading I came across a brief reference to the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville was an admirer of the American jury system. Not content with that brief reference I googled it and found the following at the Jury and Democracy Project:
Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) contended that jury deliberation served a larger civic function in America. The jury, he wrote, “is highly beneficial to those who decide the litigation” and “one of the most efficacious means for the education of the people which society can employ” (p. 337). The U.S. Supreme Court, in Powers v. Ohio (1991), invoked Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to argue that citizens not only have the right to trial by jury but also the right to serve on juries, owing to the jury’s value as a means of civic education. The American jury was designed to promote not only fair verdicts but also a sense of civic duty, and the experience of jury deliberation may boost citizens’ sense of civic responsibility and levels of public activity.
I don't know about the rest of you out there but this kind of stuff makes me proud to be a lawyer. And, as an after thought, whenever you are being pummeled by doctors with lawyer jokes remember that when doctors were bleeding George Washington to cure his ailments, lawyers were writing the U.S. Constitution.
