a government formed by voluntary
association, or on the _theory_ of voluntary association, and voluntary
support, (as all the North American governments are,) no law can
rightfully be enforced by the association in its corporate capacity,
against the goods, rights, or person of any individual, except it be
such as _all_ the members of the association agree that it may enforce.
To enforce any other law, to the extent of taking a man's goods, rights,
or person, would be making _some_ of the parties to the association
accomplices in what they regard as acts of injustice. It would also be
making them consent to what they regard as the destruction of their own
rights. These are things which no legitimate system or theory of
government can require of any of the parties to it.

The mode adopted, by the trial by jury, for ascertaining whether all the
parties to the government do approve of a particular law, is to take
twelve men at random from the whole people, and accept their unanimous
decision as representing the opinions of the whole. Even this mode is
not theoretically accurate; for theoretical accuracy would require that
every man, who was a party to the government, should individually give
his consent to the enforcement of every law in every separate case. But
such a thing would be impossible in practice. The consent of twelve men
is therefore taken instead; with the privilege of appeal, and (in case
of error found by the appeal court) a new trial, to guard against
possible mistakes. This system, it is assumed, will ascertain the sense
of the whole people--"the country"--with sufficient accuracy for all
practical purposes, and with as much accuracy as is practicable without
too great inconvenience and expense.

5. Another objection that will perhaps be made to allowing jurors to
judge of the law, and the justice of the law, is, that the law would be
uncertain.

If, by this objection, it be meant that the law would be uncertain to
the minds of the people at large, so that they would not know what the
juries would sanction and what condemn, and would not therefore know
practically what their own rights and liberties were under the law, the
objection is thoroughly baseless and false. No system of law that was
ever devised could be so entirely intelligible and certain to the minds
of the people at large as this. Compared with it, the complicated
systems of law that are compounded of the law of nature, of
constitutional g