If laws were to be received by them on the authority of these officers, the latter would have imposed such laws upon the people as they pleased.
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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The conclusion, therefore, I think, inevitably must be, that neither the laws of the king, nor the instructions of his justices, had any authority over jurors beyond what the latter saw fit to accord to them.
The oaths that have been administered to jurors, in England, and which are their legal guide to their duty, all (so far as I have ascertained them) corroborate the idea that the jurors are to try all cases on their intrinsic merits…
It is probable that an oath was never administered to a jury in England, either in a civil or criminal case, to try it according to law.
It appears from Blackstone that, even at this day, neither in civil nor criminal cases, are jurors in England sworn to try causes according to law.
They are all mere questions of natural justice, which legislatures have no power to alter, and with which they have no right to interfere, further than to provide for having them settled by the most competent and impartial tribunal that it…
And any tribunal, whether judge or jury, that attempts to try these issues, has no more moral right to be swerved from the line of justice, by the will of a legislature, than by the will of any other body of men whatever.
Guilt" is an intrinsic quality of actions, and can neither be created, destroyed, nor changed by legislation.
And no tribunal that attempts to try this issue can have any moral right to declare a man guilty, for an act that is intrinsically innocent, at the bidding of a legislature, any more than at the bidding of anybody else.
They are unquestionably in violation of the Common Law, and of Magna Carta, if by them be meant such evidence only as the government sees fit ft allow to go to the jury.
The jury cannot try an issue, unless they determine what evidence shall be admitted.
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.