Author Description

Juries and Judges versus the Law examines the efforts of Virginians to resist the imposition of a supreme law of the land, to be enforced by a supreme court. F. Thornton Miller looks at the law in Virginia and its connection to government and society during the period of the early Republic. Virginia's conservative and provincial legal perspective favored judicial proceedings at the local level. Virginia conservatives felt that a supreme law would vest too much power in a "foreign," centralized entity outside the control of the commonwealth's rural agrarian interests. Miller demonstrates that the appellate court system and the preponderance of trial by jury that ultimately developed in Virginia advanced the goal of conserving power for local elites and protecting the liberty of the citizen-farmer.. Miller gives the background to, analyzes, and interprets several key Virginia appellate court opinions and two sets of litigation that went all the way to the Supreme Court. He has researched over 4,500 civil suits from state and local courts in Virginia between 1785 and 1825, as well as legislative votes on legal and constitutional issues, newspapers, contemporary publications, statutes, and correspondence. Miller also examines the legal dimensions of Virginia's socioeconomic and political decline and the emergence of a states' rights political and constitutional doctrine in the decades following ratification of the Constitution - a doctrine that, Miller argues, originally had little to do with slavery and race. A jurisprudence and a common law arose through court opinions and the principles and practices of judges, lawyers, and juries that provided a model for what can be called a southern jurisprudence. Though reformers had some success within Virginia, the appellate court system that developed was, at best, a compromise. The local-gentry elites and justices of the peace were able to maintain their power, and law remained mostly that of country lawyers practicing in county courthouses before local juries. An appellate court system based on the idea of an unwritten constitution and common-law traditions prevailed, limiting and decentralizing power and protecting the rights and interests of states and of local communities.