Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> Andrew's comment son the history of law require some correction. The common
> law jury of the English middle ages was not a revival of whatever the Greeks
> had, in the spirit of the Renaissance; it was a wholly native growth.
The Athenian "Jury" is not even analogous to any modern legal tradition
-- it much more resembled an SDS convention or the British House of
Commons in one of its more unruly moments. It consisted of numerous
hundreds of citizens, there was no judge, no prosecuting attorney, no
defense attorney. This system combined with a real love of lawsuits by
many Athenians made public speaking skill fulfill somewhat the same
purpose as accurate shooting in the West of the movies. Your life and/or
property could depend on your skill in rhetoric. This in part accounts
for the antipathy to the sophists of anti-democrats such as Plato &
Aristotle: they taught "common people" to defend themselves -- to make
the worse appear the better reason.
Carrol
P.S. Who first used this subject line and coined the word "origination"?
