A Trying Question : : The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada / / R. Blake Brown.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Brown, R. Blake,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword / McMurtry, R. Roy / Phillips, Jim -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Maps -- Introduction -- Part One: Juror Apathy and Allegations of Jury Packing, 1820s-1848 -- 1 Storms, Roads, and Harvest Time: The Jury System and Attitudes towards Jury Service in Nova Scotia -- 2. The Jury System and Attitudes towards Jury Service in Upper Canada -- 3. 'The Bean Box': Reformers and the Politicization of the Jury System in Nova Scotia -- 4. Reformers, Rebellion, and the Jury System of Upper Canada -- Part Two: Responsible Government and the Jury, 1848-1867 -- 5. Responsible Government, the Magistrates' Affair, and the Breakdown of the Nova Scotia Jury System -- 6. Responsible Government and the 1850 Upper Canada Jury Act -- Part Three: The Decline of the Jury in Post-Confederation Canada, 1867-1880s -- 7. 'We Have Now No Fears of Star Chamber Justice': The Decline of the Jury in Nova Scotia -- 8. 'The Day Has Gone By for the Worship of Legal Idols': The Decline of the Jury in Ontario -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index -- Backmatter