To the editors:
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Early juries, as you intimated, assessed taxes, and this meant that a group of neighbors could moderate your taxes, as Lysander Spooner tells us. Not only were juries neighborhood, but they made the law of the land, as documents from around the time of Magna Carta prove. Magna Carta is a document of tax resistance. It protests that the king collected fines against the law of the land–i.e., above the assessments of juries. The Continental Congress, which rediscovered Magna Carta, was white-hot for freedom and preached juries of the neighborhood. But by the time of the Constitutional Convention things had cooled off, and the Senate nixed neighborhoods. A faint remembrance that “we the people” make “the law of the land” is implied when you bring together disparate parts of the constitution. In the Bible, read by the authors of Magna Carta, the people of the land were the humblest sort. Freedom is when the people of the land, your neighbors, make the law of the land for you. Mixed oligarchy and democracy almost took root in 1215, but failed when Magna Carta, which was a law, got idolized into the rule of law!
What the legal judgment of the peers and the law of the land mean was very quickly forgotten: that if a nobleman was to suffer the king’s vengeance for his part in the revolution of 1215–and there was one!–the king had to plead his way past a double veto: that of the nobles, the legal judgment of the peers, and the veto of the common people, the law of the land–because the city of London had opened its gates to the baronial rebels, and the barons were grateful, and, writing Magna Carta, had an eye to their own future preservation in view of the increasing power of central government in England. The twin veto meant no free man shall feel pain except by unanimous law! Juries were to make both civil and criminal law in the revolution, which is permanent. A postrevolutionary America is an unfree America. Revolutionary juries set the criminal sentence or civil award that the state dare not exceed, or we the people will punish the government. Patrick Henry was a son of Magna Carta when he wanted us to be able to “punish Congress.”
According to the literal Greek of Mark 11:22, Jesus said, Have the faith[fulness] of God.
