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.
Other statutes on this subject of the property qualifications of jurors, are given in the note.
Yet, as matters of law, these statutes were no more clear violations of the common law, the fundamental and paramount “law of the land,” than were those statutes which affixed the property qualifications before named;
From these statutes it will be seen that, since 1285, seventy years after Magna Carta, the common law right of all free British subjects to eligibility as jurors has been abolished, and the qualifications of jurors have been made a subject of arbitrary legislation.
Republic
The legal mechanism defining oligarchy, whereby a minimum wealth threshold determines eligibility for office.
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?
That based on a property qualification, said I, wherein the rich hold office and the poor man is excluded.