The civil jury must rank among the most controversial of America’s political and legal institutions. To paraphrase Kalvan and Zeisel’s ground-breaking work, the jury is a group of people, chosen at random, who are then entrusted with official decision-making powers, yet who make their decisions in secret and with little or no explanation. It is therefore not surprising that the jury has been the subject of both extravagant praise and harsh criticism (Kalven and Zeisel, 1966, pg. 66). Indeed, contemporary critics of the civil justice system decry a “litigation explosion” of “frivolous lawsuits” decided by incompetent, irrational and gullible jurors.1 Despite this heated rhetoric surrounding the jury, relatively little is known about how civil juries reach their verdicts.

Кл.слова:
судова система -- судовий процес

Contemporary accounts of what’s “natural” for human society still cite the thirteenth-century system of Thomas Aquinas – even on the Supreme Court. But those accounts ignore his biblical commentaries, which reveal something much stranger. Against the reigning impression, the commentaries embed all law, even the law of nature, in a sexually charged story of decline by specific ethnic groups – Jews and Gentiles – gendered in changing ways and redeemed by the reinsemination of divine grace. This book uses accounts of ethnicity and gender, nature and grace in Aquinas’s biblical commentaries to reframe the systematic works (especially his Summa theologiae) still quoted in court. The whole advantage of natural law is supposed to lie in its independence from any particular group, history, or religion. That is why rival views of gender and sexuality both appeal to “nature” and cite Aquinas. But Aquinas’s Summa ties natural law to specific biblical passages, where his commentary describes a nature that differs by ethnicity, varies over time, and changes sexuality by God’s decree. This destabilizes turn-of-the-twenty-first-century uses, liberal or conservative.

Кл.слова:
середньовічна філософія -- релігієзнавство -- екзегетика -- моральні категорії