“No Kings” is a good starting point...
Protests as a place for outreach and education about jury nullification
Almost everyone is inconsistent in their support for liberty, but just the same almost everyone feels its appeal. We may disagree with our neighbors on many things, and we may judge the various ways they have not always championed liberty, but when they have reason to recoil from the jackboots it can be a learning opportunity to become more consistent and principled.
FIJA is a non-partisan organization, but in defending the rights of jurors and emphasizing Lysander Spooner’s abolitionist values, we inevitably find ourselves critical of whatever party is in power. The drastic expansions of state power under the Trump administration, to say nothing of further erosion of constitutional checks and balances, has sent millions of liberals marching in the streets under the banner of “No Kings.” And while it’s easy to be standoffish or cynical, given the policies many of those marching have naively supported or continue to support, liberty flourishes when we engage in good faith. To that end, FIJA activists have turned out to these “No Kings” marches with literature on the rights of jurors and the vital role of juries in checking tyranny.
Conversations about liberty have to start somewhere, and sincere horror at instances of injustice or unchecked power are a starting point that can transform lives.
The modern trial by jury, and the inextricable right to jury nullification, has its origin in struggles by commoners against kings and lords in feudal Europe. When some brag of supposed unchecked presidential power and stage military occupations of American cities, there are few greater examples of checks against potential “kings” than jury nullification.
This October 18th, millions of Americans plan on marching in another of these “No Kings” protests—we encourage FIJA activists and supporters to show up and treat them as an opportunity for education and productive conversation. A list of planned events is available here.
Americans can disagree on many things, but our nation was founded on a rejection of kings and it’s worth embracing that impulse everywhere on the political spectrum that it can still be found.
England will lose jury trials at the hand of the Fabians Labour Government. Excellent tweet here. Please comment.
https://x.com/CsTominaga/status/1994051691474518487
“What is being proposed is not a reform. It is a confession of contempt for the very people from whom the state claims its legitimacy. The jury is not a sentimental relic; it is the practical assertion that the citizen is sovereign in judgement, that the state must persuade the governed before it may punish them. Remove that, and you do not streamline justice. You sever the moral tendon that binds power to consent.
For eight centuries the jury has been the visible line of demarcation between law and command. It is the one institution that tells authority, in plain and humiliating terms, that its conclusions are not self-authenticating. Twelve ordinary minds, unbought and unappointed, are required to say, “Yes, this accusation has met the standard of proof.” That is not romanticism. That is civilisation’s hard-earned distrust of concentrated power. The moment judgement becomes the private monopoly of professional tribunals, the citizen is no longer a participant in justice but a subject of administration.
The pretexts are always pathetic. “Efficiency.” “Cost.” “Backlogs.” These are the slogans of a managerial class that cannot imagine any value higher than its own convenience. Liberty is not a line item to be trimmed when spreadsheets groan. If a state cannot afford the safeguards that prevent tyranny, then it cannot afford to call itself legitimate. The cost of juries is the cost of freedom; the price of abolishing them is paid in fear, silence, and the quiet normalisation of arbitrary rule.
And notice the timing. We are told to accept this surrender just after a crackdown in which speech itself was treated as a prosecutable impurity, and people received grotesque sentences for words on a screen while violent criminals walked out early under the same government’s “capacity” regime. This is the logic of a state that has come to mistake dissent for danger and obedience for virtue. To place the whole weight of criminal judgement into the hands of a politicised bench — after it has already shown how cheaply it values conscience — is not merely reckless. It is the deliberate construction of a soft police order, dressed in robes and euphemism.
A compulsory digital ID system, hand-in-hand with the shrinkage of juries, completes the picture. Identification to watch you, tribunals to convict you, and a public square trained to keep quiet lest it be denounced as “harmful.” That is not a free society drifting by accident into error. That is a society being led, quite purposefully, into managed submission.
If Scotland has any remaining instinct for self-respect, it should leave the union rather than be dragged further into this antiseptic authoritarianism. A nation that values its own moral agency does not consent to be ruled by strangers who fear the verdict of ordinary citizens. Better an independent country with the courage to preserve trial by peers than a subordinate province in a kingdom that barters ancient liberties for bureaucratic tidiness.
Juries are critical because they embody the only political principle worth defending: that the individual is not livestock in the state’s corral. They are the institutional reminder that justice is not what officials declare but what free men and women, hearing evidence under law, are willing to affirm. Take that away and you have not improved the law; you have replaced it with authority’s monologue. And a monologue is always the language of tyrants, whether they whisper it in velvet tones or shout it through sirens.”