“Guilty of Publishing Only”: Jury Nullification as a Legal Defense in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract Previous research is largely mute about the strategies that printers and their legal counsels used to defend state libel lawsuits. Analysis of the legal arguments employed in sixty-eight state libel jury trials in anglophone courts from 1699 to 1792 identifies which of them were most associated with acquittal. Jury-nullification arguments, based on freedom of the press, which encouraged jurors to disregard judges’ directives and to contravene the law, had a higher rate of success than did approaches based on the standard legal precedents of the period. These findings suggest that the public was sympathetic with a broad interpretation of press freedom at a time when many Crown judges attempted to limit it exclusively to prior restraint.