When the American colonies revolted against England, they did not reject every element of English life. One example of the continuing British influence is the role of the jury in the

U.S. legal system. The right to a trial by jury was established in 1215 in the Magna Carta, a document that developed out of a conflict between King John and rebellious nobles. In the thirty- ninth clause of that document, the king promised: “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned . . . or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Although early jurors also served as witnesses, by the fifteenth century the sole purpose of jurors was to judge the facts of a case based on...