It would be a solecism and absurdity in government to allow such consequences as these.
Lysander Spooner
The Public Record
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
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From the sale of that justice which every citizen has a right to demand, it was an easy transition to withhold or deny it.
One answer is, that this power, which juries have of judging of the law, is not a power of absolute decision in all cases.
In this manner all unjust laws are established, and made operative against the rights of the people.
They cannot claim or expect that the whole people shall practise the folly of taking on trust their pretended superior knowledge, and of committing blindly into their hands all their own interests, liberties, and rights, to be disposed of…
It would also be making them consent to what they regard as the destruction of their own rights.
Why should they not have such an administration of justice as they desire, and can understand?
Since Magna Carta, we have evidence showing quite conclusively that all freemen, above the age of twenty-one years, were eligible as jurors.
All those who are not forbidden by law may be judges (jurors).
The presumption clearly is that all were eligible.
In nearly or quite all the States of the United States the juries are illegal, for one or the other of the same reasons that make the juries in England illegal.
If the authority be vested in the government, the governmnt is absolute, and the people have no liberties except such as the government sees fit to indulge them with.