Property Qualification for Jurors
idea · 2 works · 3 mentions · 4 anchored passages
property qualification · freehold qualification · freehold qualification for jurors · landed qualification · the required valuation
in the texts
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
The requirement, introduced by successive English statutes, that jurors own land of a specified value, which the author argues illegitimately narrowed the common-law pool of eligible jurors.
This act was continued in force by 1 Henry VIII.
And the members of the state were therefore called freeholders.
It is true, the ancient common law required the jurors to be freeholders;
Republic
The legal mechanism defining oligarchy, whereby a minimum wealth threshold determines eligibility for office.
That based on a property qualification, said I, wherein the rich hold office and the poor man is excluded.
And is it not then that they pass a law defining the limits of an oligarchical polity, prescribing a sum of money, a larger sum where it is more of an oligarchy, where it is less a smaller, and proclaiming that no man shall hold office whose property does not come up to the required valuation?