A trying question
Subtitle: the jury in nineteenth-century Canada
By: R. Blake Brown.
Contributors: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.
Publisher: Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Toronto; Buffalo, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9781442640382
Subjects: Jury -- Canada -- History -- 19th century
Description: "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 because they could be 'packed' to achieve desired verdicts and were often considered a nuisance by those who had to serve. With the legal profession's expansion, many viewed juries 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-321) and index.