The Jury System

A century after the Founders enshrined the right to a jury trial in the Seventh Amendment, some Americans had come to view the practice as a failure to be curtailed or discarded. In the first volume of the Yale Law Journal, Oliver P. Shiras, a federal judge on the District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, entered this late nineteenth-century debate to defend the jury as an essential, if imperfect, instrument of democratic justice. According to its critics, the jury trial presented two main problems: a relative lack of formal qualifications among the jurors, with the supposedly resulting danger of bribery, and a lack of specialized knowledge to analyze increasingly complex legal matters. Shiras questioned the accuracy of these assumptions while also arguing that their effects could be mitigated without dismantling the jury trial. For Shiras, juries excel at fact-finding grounded in common experience and serve a vital civic role by involving ordinary citizens in the machinery of government. Shiras considered the jury trial an indispensable component of democracy: “Under our form of government, it is of the utmost importance that in every possible way, the mass of the people should be identified with the machinery of the government, and should actively participate in the various movements thereof.”1

Shiras’s words continue to resonate in the pages of the Yale Law Journal today. In the Issue 2 of Volume 135, Thomas Frampton’s Radical Roots of the Democratic Jury situates Shiras’s piece within a longer historical arc as it chronicles popular discourse about the jury from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century. Frampton picks up where Shiras left off: recounting a radical movement to ensure that the people—not just upper-class white men, but all people—could actively participate as jurors. Frampton’s radicals likely went much farther than Shiras envisioned, but both pieces together illuminate a long history of popular support for and resistance against the democratic jury. These two works, which stand in dialogue across 135 years of Yale Law Journal scholarship, chart the contested history of the democratic jury—an institution that modern discourse often takes for granted, but was hard-won, as Shiras and Frampton demonstrate, through decades of contestation and reform.