Trial by jury in the reign of Alexander II: A study in the legal culture of late imperial Russia, 1864-1881

This study examines the workings of trial by jury in late imperial Russia in order to illuminate aspects of Russian legal culture. The historical context for analysis is the era of modernizing judicial reform begun in 1864. The specific chronological focus is the period 1864-1881, during which trial by jury, as the embodiment of Western-style progressive justice, represented the ideological and institutional centerpiece of the reform.;The term "legal culture" is understood to mean the values, ideas, and habits of judicial mind that inform the operation of law and justice in a given society. In Russian trial by jury, the court of law became an arena in which witnesses, attorneys, jurors, the judge, and the public both reflected existing patterns of legal mentalite and created distinctively new ones. This new legal-cultural consciousness, which owed much to the heritage of pre-reform Russian culture and customary law, emerged as the product of lived judicial experience.;The study's principal sources are published jury trial transcripts and procedural codes. Contemporary Russian jurists' commentaries on the reform statutes and the published trial speeches of well-known Russian defense attorneys are also prominently utilized. Four aspects of the new jury system receive attention: its mixed adversarial-inquisitorial procedure, in reality a form of consensual adjudication; the reflection of traditional social and religious values in the use of the judicial oath; the distinctively Russian tendency to particularize and individualize culpability, as manifested in how final questions were submitted to the jury; and the moralization of criminal guilt, as revealed in the legal rhetoric employed during trials.;The analysis militates against the customary interpretation of the judicial reform as simply one of numerous modernizing changes undertaken by the autocracy. The legal culture of the early reform era represented a diverse and sometimes contradictory merging of traditional legal values and practices with self-consciously innovative and unfamiliar ones. The reform's impact on the relationship between law and society thus complicates scholars' long-held general view that late imperial Russian legal life was characterized mainly by the growing penetration of Western-derived principles and forms.