Their privileges and their duties were closely conjoined; most frequently, the statutes themselves were only affirmances of ancient customs, or declaratory enactments.
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.
gutenberg.org
These examples at least show that there is nothing improbable or unnatural in the idea that juries should try all civil suits according to their own judgments, independently of all laws of the king.
There is substantially the same reason why a jury ought to judge of the justice of laws, and hold all unjust laws invalid, in civil suits, as in criminal ones.
That reason is the necessity of guarding against the tyranny of the government.
For example, individuals may be deprived, of their liberty, and robbed of their property, by judgments rendered in civil suits, as well as in criminal ones.
If the laws of the king were imperative upon a jury in civil suits, the king might enact laws giving one man's property to another, or confiscating it to the king himself, and authorizing civil suits to obtain possession of it.
So that, if an unjust law were binding upon a jury in civil suits, a defendant, by resisting the execution of the judgment, could, in effect, convert the civil action into a criminal one, in which the jury would be paramount to the same…
In other words, in the criminal suit, the jury would be obliged to justify the defendant in resisting a law, which, in the civil suit, they had said he was bound to submit to.
If the jury, in this civil suit, are bound to hold the law obligatory, they render a judgment in favor of B, that he be put in possession of the property; thereby declaring that A is bound to submit to a law depriving him of his property.
On this trial his plea is, that in killing the sheriff, he was simply exercising his natural right of defending his property against an unjust law.
The jury, not being bound, in a criminal case, by the authority of an unjust law, judge the act on its merits, and acquit the defendant thus declaring that he was not bound to submit to the same law which the jury, in the civil suit, had…
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.