Grand Juries, Legal Machines, and the Common Man Jury

This paper focuses on the concept of a jury of one’s neighbors, that is, the common man jury. It traces this construction through two eighteenth-century trails (the trials of John Peter Zenger, 1735, and of Eleazer Oswald, 1783) and examines juries as they have been regarded in the literary efforts of two early American judges—a poem by Francis Hopkinson, “Adrian’s Assertion,” and the novel Modern Chivalry and a legal handbook, Law’s Miscellanies of Hugh Henry Brackenridge. The notion of trial by jury is extended to consider the public event of trial by press, engaging the public’s extralegal involvement in performing the jury role. Finally, the paper concludes that the concept of a jury of one’s neighbors acted as a counter-weight to a legal machinery that sometimes shortchanged individual rights and common sense in preference for the sophistry of security and the rights of the state.