This is the law, and this its policy. The jury are not to decide on the
competency of witnesses, or of any other kind of evidence, in any way
whatsoever. Nothing of that kind can come before them. But the Lords in
the High Court of Parliament are not, either actually or virtually, a
jury. No legal power is interposed between them and evidence; they are
themselves by law fully and exclusively equal to it. They are persons of
high rank, generally of the best education, and of sufficient knowledge
of the world; and they are a permanent, a settled, a corporate, and not
an occasional and transitory judicature. But it is to be feared that the
authority of the Judges (in the case of juries legal) may, from that
example, weigh with the Lords further than its reason or its
applicability to the judicial capacity of the Peers can support. It is
to be feared, that if the Lords should think themselves bound implicitly
to submit to this authority, that at length they may come to think
themselves to be no better than jurors, and may virtually consent to a
partition of that judicature which the law has left to them whole,
supreme, uncontrolled, and final.
This final and independent judicature, because it is final and
independent, ought to be very cautious with regard to the rejection of
evidence.
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