Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/200

 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