They are secret, because their reasons for their decrees are to be found only in great volumes of statutes and supreme court reports, which the mass of the people have neither money to buy, nor time to read; and would not understand, if they were to read them.
Spooner points out that legal knowledge is inaccessible to most people, creating a barrier to justice.
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Since Magna Carta, we have evidence showing quite conclusively that all freemen, above the age of twenty-one years, were eligible as jurors.
And whenever any number of men, calling themselves a government, do anything to another man, or to his property, which they had no right to do as individuals they thereby declare themselves trespassers, robbers, or murderers, according to…
It was simply, that they would neither convict the innocent, nor acquit the guilty.
And yet these reasons, which are really no reasons at all, are the only ones, so far as I know, that have ever been offered for this absurd and brutal doctrine.