The Law of the Other

This is an account of the English doctrine of the "mixed jury". Constable's excavation of the historical, rhetorical and theoretical foundations of modern law recasts our legal and sociological understandings of the American jury and our contemporary conceptions of law, citizenship and truth. The "mixed jury" doctrine allowed resident foreigners to have law suits against English natives tried before juries composed half of natives and half of aliens like themselves. As she traces the transformations in this doctrine from the Middle Ages to its abolition in 1870, Constable also reveals the emergence of a world where law rooted in actual practices and customs of communities is replaced by law determined by officials, where juries no longer strive to speak the truth but to ascertain the facts.