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John Henry Wigmore Quotes

Cross-examination is the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. A lawyer can do anything with cross-examination if he is skillful enough not

Cross-examination is the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. A lawyer can do anything with cross-examination if he is skillful enough not to impale his own cause upon it.

John Henry Wigmore
Discovery, Bayonets, Examination
John Henry Wigmore, John Theodore McNaughton, Peter Tillers, James Harmon Chadbourn (1974). “Evidence in trials at common law”

Cross-examination is beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. ... Cross-examination, not trial by jury, is the great and permanent contribution of the Anglo-American system of law to improved methods of trial-procedure.

John Henry Wigmore
Discovery, Law, Doubt
John Henry Wigmore (1923). “A Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of All Jurisdictions of the United States and Canada”

... The popular attitude toward the administration of justice should be one of respect and confidence. Bureaucratic, purely official justice, can never receive such confidence. The one way to secure it is to give the citizen-body itself a share in the administration of justice. And that is what jury-trial does.

John Henry Wigmore
Attitude, Giving, Justice

Trial by jury must be preserved. It is the best system ever invented for a free people in the world's history.

John Henry Wigmore
People, Trials, World

Law and justice are from time to time inevitably in conflict ... . The jury ... adjusts the general rule of law to the justice to the particular case. Thus the odium of inflexible rules of law is avoided, and popular satisfaction is preserved ... That is what jury trial does. It supplies that flexibility of legal rules which is essential to justice and popular contentment.

John Henry Wigmore
Law, Justice, Contentment

Trial by jury must and shall be preserved! Amidst the throng of crude sacrilegisms ... that assail us nowadays in the legal sanctuary, none is more shortsighted, none more dangerous, than the proposal to abolish trial by jury.

John Henry Wigmore
Trials, Sanctuary, Proposal

The grand solid merit of jury trial is that the jurors ... are selected at the last moment from the multitude of citizens. They cannot be known beforehand, and they melt back into the multitiude after each trial.

John Henry Wigmore
Citizens, Trials, Lasts

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