Politics & Power Quote by Lysander Spooner

Spooner is trying to blow up the comforting civic fairy tale that law automatically equals justice. In this line, he treats the jury box less like a fact-finding workstation and more like the last pressure valve in a system that otherwise concentrates power upward. If jurors are reduced to clerks who merely apply statutes, he argues, then the state can legalize its own abuses and still claim legitimacy. The point isn’t abstract: it’s a warning about how oppression often arrives wearing paperwork.

The specific intent is radical and strategic. Spooner wants juries to claim the authority to judge not only whether someone broke a law, but whether the law deserves obedience at all. That’s jury nullification before the phrase became a culture-war talking point: a theory of citizen resistance embedded inside a courtroom routine. His subtext is distrust of institutional self-policing. Legislatures, executives, and courts can align; procedure can launder coercion into “due process.” The jury, pulled from ordinary people, is his antidote to a professional governing class.

Context matters because Spooner is writing in 19th-century America, when battles over slavery, fugitive slave laws, and federal power made “law” a moral trap as often as a civic good. He’s also a libertarian abolitionist suspicious of the Constitution itself. The sentence works because it sets a stark binary: either jurors can judge justice, or the people have no meaningful shield. It’s not subtle, and that’s the point. Spooner’s rhetoric refuses compromise with the idea that legality is a moral alibi.