Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by John Henry Wigmore

Explore popular quotes and sayings by John Henry Wigmore.

Last updated on September 19, 2024.

John Henry Wigmore (1863–1943) was an American lawyer and legal scholar known for his expertise in the law of evidence and for his influential scholarship. Wigmore taught law at Keio University in Tokyo (1889–1892) before becoming the first full-time dean of Northwestern Law School (1901–1929). His scholarship is best remembered for his Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law (1904), often simply called Wigmore on Evidence, and a graphical analysis method known as a Wigmore chart.

March 4, 1863 - April 20, 1943

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

... 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

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

Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by John Henry Wigmore

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