Jury Duty in de Tocqueville’s Time and in the Present

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat sent by his country to inspect American penitentiaries during the 1830s.  He dutifully delivered his report, but he also found himself interested in more than penitentiaries.  In Democracy in America (1835), he provided a wide-ranging and to this day highly regarded account of life in the youthful, rambunctious American Republic.  Somewhat surprisingly, de Tocqueville discussed at length the role and function of jury duty.

photo of jury summons

Although de Tocqueville recognized the jury as a “juridical institution,” that is, a body that renders verdicts, he was more interested in the jury as a “political institution.”  He argued that the jury “puts the real control of affairs into the hands of the ruled, or some of them, rather than into those of the rulers.”  The jury was a vehicle through which the citizenry could exercise its sovereignty.

What’s more, jury duty struck de Tocqueville as a “free school.”  “Juries, especially civil juries,” he thought, “instill some of the habits of the judicial mind into every citizen, and just those habits are the very best way of preparing people to be free.”  As a form of “popular education,” jury duty offers practical lessons in the law and teaches jurors their rights under the law.

Overall, de Tocqueville was pleased Americans took eagerly to jury duty and felt robust, active juries were extremely important in the success of the nation.  Jury duty, he said, “makes men pay attention to things other than their own affairs” and thereby “combat that individual selfishness which is like rust in society.”

How disappointed de Tocqueville would be learn how people perceive jury duty in the present.  While people who actually serve on juries tend to say their experiences were positive ones, a huge percentage of Americans dread receiving a summons for jury duty and do their best to avoid serving.  Websites such as “How to Get Out of Jury Duty” and “10 Ways to Avoid Jury Duty” are popular.

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Collecting Posts on the Public Trust Doctrine in Its American Birthplace

Thank you to my colleague, Professor David A. Strifling, director of Marquette Law School’s Water Law and Policy Initiative, for his generous post a few weeks ago concerning Tom Merrill’s and my new book, Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell University Press). The book ranges over almost two centuries and the different stories that led to the Chicago lakefront’s varied but largely integrated and altogether splendid whole. Given these temporal and geographic variations, “the core insight that shapes Kearney and Merrill’s Lakefront”—that “[t]he making of Chicago’s extraordinary landscape along Lake Michigan required law, lots and lots of law” (Professor Hendrik Hartog of Princeton University)—made intuitive sense to us from the beginning. Or at least it did to my coauthor, a noted scholar of property law.

Major areas along the Chicago lakefront (map by Chicago CartoGraphics): Figure 0.2 from Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell, 2021)

Yet as our book’s title suggests, however much other law has been involved, the public trust doctrine has been at the forefront of lakefront controversies, at least since the Supreme Court of the United States used the Lake Front Case (more formally known as Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892)) to announce the American experiment with the doctrine. So Professor Merrill and I took a guest-blogging opportunity at the Volokh Conspiracy this past week to focus on the public trust doctrine. Here are links to our series of posts:

You can find us a month or so from now guest-blogging at The Faculty Lounge, where we expect to consider the rules that govern—or might govern—who has standing to raise the different sorts of legal claims whose disposition has helped shape the Chicago lakefront. Each of these rules is in some way problematic, and differences among them have had notable effects on what a resident or tourist today finds on the lakefront—and what he or she does not. “[L]ots and lots of law,” it has been said.

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Chicago’s Lakefront: The Rise of the Public Trust Doctrine (and Much More)

Urbs in Horto”— city in a garden—is the motto Chicago’s founders chose upon the city’s incorporation on March 4, 1837. At the time, this was more of a vision than a statement of fact, as the city had few public parks then, and preserving its existing open spaces seemed uncertain at best. Given the industrial waterfronts in many other large cities, it is a marvel that Chicagoans made that early vision a reality, at least along the water, by creating the city’s magnificent lakefront parks and protecting open space over nearly two centuries. How did it happen, and what are the lessons for urban development more generally? The definitive account is provided in Lakefront, a remarkable new book twenty years in the making, coauthored by Marquette Law School Dean (and Chicago native) Joseph D. Kearney and Columbia University’s Thomas W. Merrill.

Lakefront is, at its core, a story about Chicago and the development of its world-renowned lakefront. But Kearney and Merrill also make a significant contribution in untangling the American development of the public trust doctrine, which has been called “unquestionably one of the most important elements of U.S. natural resources law.”[1] The Supreme Court has recognized the doctrine’s ancient origin and its roots in Roman law.[2] Scholars have traced it to the Code of Justinian. Today the doctrine is generally thought to protect and preserve certain natural resources of a “special character,” through a perpetual trust intended to prevent the unimpeded exercise of private rights upon them. But clarifying the doctrine’s operational reach has proven difficult, and it has evolved into many different strains of varying strength primarily governed by state common law. However, all agree that Justice Stephen Field’s 1892 opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois was the moment at which the doctrine became a prominent feature of American law. Lakefront provides groundbreaking new details and a blow-by-blow account of how the case originated from the battles between public and private rights on the Chicago lakefront.

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