The jury, a central institution of the trial process, exemplifies in popular perception the distinctiveness of our legal tradition. Nevertheless, juries today try only a small minority of cases. A Trying Question traces the history of the jury in Canada and links its nineteenth-century decline to the rise of the professional class.
R. Blake Brown shows that juries could be controversial, as they could be stacked and were often considered a nuisance by those who had to serve. With the legal profession's expansion, many saw them as amateur, ineffective, and unnecessarily expensive bodies that ought to be supplanted by those trained to sift through and correctly interpret evidence.
A Trying Question's fascinating history outlines the ways in which lay people became less involved in Canada's legal system and illustrates how judges, rather than jurors drawn from the community, would come to find verdicts in most court cases.
| ISBN: | 9781442640382 |
| Publication date: | 30th October 2009 |
| Author: | R Blake Brown |
| Publisher: | University of Toronto Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 416 pages |
| Series: | Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History |
| Genres: |
Legal systems: courts and procedures Jury trials General and world history History of the Americas |
The jury, a central institution of the trial process, exemplifies in popular perception the distinctiveness of our legal tradition. Nevertheless, juries today try only a small minority of cases. A Trying Question traces the history of the jury in Canada and links its nineteenth-century decline to the rise of the professional class.
R. Blake Brown shows that juries could be controversial, as they could be stacked and were often considered a nuisance by those who had to serve. With the legal profession's expansion, many saw them as amateur, ineffective, and unnecessarily expensive bodies that ought to be supplanted by those trained to sift through and correctly interpret evidence.
A Trying Question's fascinating history outlines the ways in which lay people became less involved in Canada's legal system and illustrates how judges, rather than jurors drawn from the community, would come to find verdicts in most court cases.
A Trying Question features in the following genres: Legal systems: courts and procedures, Jury trials, General and world history, History of the Americas
A Trying Question is available in Hardback
A Trying Question was written by R Blake Brown and published by University of Toronto Press
A Trying Question has 416 pages
Yes it is part of Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History series