the property; _thereby declaring that
A is bound to submit to a law depriving him of his property_. But when
the execution of that judgment comes to be attempted--that is, when the
sheriff comes to take the property for the purpose of delivering it to
B--A acting, as he has a _natural_ right to do, in defence of his
property, resists and kills the sheriff. He is thereupon indicted for
murder. On this trial his plea is, that in killing the sheriff, he was
simply exercising his _natural_ right of defending his property against
an unjust law. The jury, not being bound, in a _criminal_ case, by the
authority of an unjust law, judge the act on its merits, and acquit the
defendant--thus declaring that he was _not_ bound to submit to the same
law which the jury, in the _civil_ suit, had, by their judgment,
declared that he _was_ bound to submit to. Here is a contradiction
between the two judgments. In the _civil_ suit, the law is declared to
be obligatory upon A; in the _criminal_ suit, the same law is declared
to be of no obligation.

It would be a solecism and absurdity in government to allow such
consequences as these. Besides, it would be practically impossible to
maintain government on such principles; for no government could enforce
its _civil_ judgments, unless it could support them by _criminal_ ones,
in case of resistance. A jury must therefore be paramount to legislation
in both civil and criminal cases, or in neither. If they are paramount
in neither, they are no protection to liberty. If they are paramount in
both, then all legislation goes only for what it may chance to be worth
in the estimation of a jury.

Another reason why Magna Carta makes the discretion and consciences of
juries paramount to all legislation in _civil_ suits, is, that if
legislation were binding upon a jury, the jurors--(by reason of their
being unable to read, as jurors in those days were, and also by reason
of many of the statutes being unwritten, or at least not so many copies
written as that juries could be supplied with them)--would have been
necessitated--at least in those courts in which the king's justices
sat--to take the word of those justices as to what the laws of the king
really were. In other words, they would have been necessitated _to take
the law from the court_, as jurors do now.

Now there were two reasons why, as we may rationally suppose, the people
did not wish juries to take their law from the king's judges. One was,