Why the Founders Cherished the Jury

As historian William Nelson notes, "For Americans after the Revolution, as well as before, the right to trial by jury was probably the most valued of all civil rights."3 Writing in 1788, Alexander Hamilton observed that among the "friends and adversaries of the plan of the [Constitutional] convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury."4 Hamilton's chief political rival, Thomas Jefferson, echoed these sentiments, and considered trial by jury as the "only anchor ever yet invented by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." Such was the devotion to trial by jury that when delegates gathered at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the "excellences" of jury trials were "so well understood" that it was not considered "necessary to be very prolix in pointing them out." The Founders quickly moved to protect juries in Article II, Section Two, and in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the Constitution.