The Essentials of American Constitutional LawThorpe, Francis Newton
History
The Essentials of American Constitutional Law
Thorpe, Francis Newton
Constitutional law -- United States
the Amendment.[450]
161. The right of trial by jury, reserved as a fundamental right, is a
common law right of great antiquity. As the word “jury” is used in the
Constitution, and as jury trial is secured by the Seventh Amendment,
its meaning must be discovered from English history and common-law
practice. That history and that practice alike prove that only a court
of law can have a jury, and that a body of men free from judicial
control is not and never was a common-law jury; that is, according to
the Seventh Amendment, a constitutional jury is a jury in a court of
record, and a number of men, a so-called jury in a court of a justice
of the peace, is not a jury in the sense in which that word is used in
the Constitution. A court, when we consider its derivation and history,
comprises the judge assisting the jury and the jury assisting the
judge. The right of trial by jury means for many purposes the same as
the right to due process of law.[451]
162. The fundamentals of government are a unit, like government itself,
and he who rests his case on one fundamental right really rests his
case on all. The principle which permeates and includes all these
fundamentals—usually set forth in Bills of Rights—is thus expressed by
the Supreme Court:
When we consider the nature and the theory of our institutions of
government, the principles upon which they are supposed to rest,
and review the history of their development, we are constrained
to conclude that they do not mean to leave room for the play and
action of purely personal and arbitrary power. Sovereignty itself
is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source
of law; but in our system, while sovereign powers are delegated to
the agencies of government, sovereignty itself remains with the
people, by whom and for whom all government exists and acts. And
the law is the definition and limitation of power. It is, indeed,
quite true, that there must always be lodged somewhere, and in some
person or body, the authority of final decision; and in many cases
of mere administration the responsibility is purely political,
no appeal lying except to the ultimate tribunal of the public
judgment, exercised either in the pressure of opinion or by means
of the suffrage. But the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, considered as individual possessions,
are secured by those maxims of constitutional law which are the
monuments showing the victorious progress of the race in securing
to men the blessings of civilization under the reign of just and
equal laws, so that, in the famous language of the Massachusetts
Bill of Rights, the government of the Commonwealth “may be a
government of laws and not of men.” For the very idea that one man
may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any
material right essential to the enjoyment of life, at the mere will
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