Lysander Spooner: “What is the object of government, but to protect men's rights?”

Since Magna Carta, we have evidence showing quite conclusively that all freemen, above the age of twenty-one years, were eligible as jurors.

The people are no more arrayed against themselves, when a jury puts its veto upon a statute, which the other tribunals have sanctioned, than they are when the same veto is exercised by the representatives, the senate, the executive, or the…

The presumption clearly is that all were eligible.

Yet the codes of the most celebrated kings are very small, and were little more than compilations of immemorial customs.