English common people
group · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
common people · the people · the English people · the mass of the people
in the texts
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
The English common people, whose approval of laws is expressed only through jury enforcement.
The common people had no other legal form of making known their approbation of particular laws.
Do you concede that the just laws and customs, which the common people have chosen, shall be preserved;
Now there were two reasons why, as we may rationally suppose, the people did not wish juries to take their law from the king’s judges.
The Law of Intellectual Property
The general population of England, contrasted with the ruling king, nobility, and parliament.
the people would have become enlightened;
If, then, any considerable portion of them were sustained, that fact indicates that even in that rude and ignorant age, the unlearned common people—of whom the juries were composed—had some natural and just, though imperfect, appreciation, either of a man’s right of property in his invention, or of their moral indebtedness to one who gave a new and valuable art to the public.
If, however, it shall be thought by any one, that the question could not have been so easily settled, and that juries would have been incompetent and unfavorable tribunals for adjudicating on such a matter, he will perhaps change that opinion when he reflects, that, if Common Law principles in general, and the Common Law form of government, had been preserved, the common people, living under the p …