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I worked as a regular newspaper columnist, I absorbed two informal, folkloric strictures on subject matter: No columns based on conversations with cab drivers and none touting jury service as a magisterium of democracy, where one’s faith in the people is refreshed. The fear, I think, was that a columnist who dotes on the wisdom of cabbies or fellow jurors is confessing that he becomes one of “the people” only from the back of a cab or when he has been summoned legally to meet with “the people” face-to-face.
Yet everything Tocqueville says about juries as schools of democratic virtue and bulwarks of liberty and equality is true, and not because deliberating with other jurors deflates a pundit’s conceits. I’ve served on five New York City juries, criminal and civil, in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and every one of them confirmed Tocqueville’s observation that juries instill a deep sense of equity that arises in sharing responsibility for another person’s fate.
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