Study Questions on Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917

Circles: Buff. Women's JL & Soc. Pol'y, 1997

Theatre Journal, 1992

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On Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers”: Centennial Essays, Interviews and Adaptations. Eds. Martha Carpentier and Emeline Jouve. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 62-78

Feminine Trifles. The Construction of Gender Roles in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and in Modern English and American Crime Stories. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken, 2008.

Law & Literature, Vol. 19 No.3. 358-376, 2007

In Susan Glaspell's Jury of Her Peers, women's awakening, their feminine bonding, and ideological activism are inseparable from their realization of the gender discrimination and oppression inherent in the existing legal system, and their responsive creation of alternative, feminine justice and judgment. The search for feminist consciousness and the foundation of an informed community of women imply rejection of the legal order as a tool of patriarchal domination, and exploration of feminine legal thought. I suggest that in her  short story, Glaspell anticipates both legal feminist theory that focuses on dominance, oppression, and resistance, 2 and psychological feminist theory that focuses on an ethics of care, women's voice, and feminine networking. 3 Further, her narrative offers a uniquely coherent, comprehensive world-view, combining the two perspectives, often perceived as contrasting. Quilting serves as a three-dimensional metaphor for feminine social networking, feminist storytelling, and women's engagement in law (their unique method of piecing evidence together). Quilting thus symbolically mediates between the fundamental structures of feminine community, feminist literature, and feminist legal thought. Introducing jurisprudential rhetoric, I go on to show how Glaspell's literary quilting of feminine communality and feminist legal thinking represents an episode of emerging feminist consciousness as an act of collective "conscientious objection"-if not potential revolution. My essay concludes with the suggestion, based on personal teaching experience, to include Jury in law-school curriculum, together with contemporary feminist films. Significant issues and motifs link Glaspell's short story (and play) with contemporary feminist film. Read with Glaspell's text, feminist films can be seen as modern, influential remakes of her turn-of-the-century work. Such films, as well as their literary predecessor, are powerful teaching materials in twenty-first-century law school curriculum.

2015

Journal Of Legal History, 2012

In November 1670, Chief Justice John Vaughan established, in Bushell’s Case, that jurors could no longer be judicially fined for reaching a conclusion with which the trial judge disagreed. This case has traditionally been taken as a foundational moment in the history of jury power; but in the last few decades its significance has been downplayed by legal historians, who have pointed to the continued existence of judicial control of their juries. This article, drawing on recent work on conscience as a juridical concept in early-modern England, seeks to rehabilitate Bushell’s Case, and does so by situating in within its wider discursive setting. Bushell’s Case, taken together with the concurrent pamphlet literature, offers a positive model of jury trial which downplays the jury’s relationship either with the judge’s or with the sovereign’s laws in favour of a focus on the juryman’s soul. Whatever the practical limitations of the idea, this reconceptualisation of jury trial is an important moment in the history of jury power, and one which warrants study on its own terms.

Women as Jurors: San Francisco Experiment is an Interesting Study in Psychology," read a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1913. 1 In California, women became jurors in certain locales following the adoption of equal suffrage, and this report sought to evaluate this new "experiment" in women"s citizenship. 2 It found that an all-woman jury summoned to try a female defendant had "interpreted justice and so far the heavens have not fallen." While it exaggerated the potential consequences of the trial, the report evaluated the women jurors, finding "their mental processes are such they will always deliberate on different lines" than men.

2011

Somehow, by some process, some of the pains and suffering we sustain in life become cognizable legal injuries: if we are hurt through the defamatory utterances of others, we might seek compensation; if we suffer a whiplash in an automobile accident when we're rear-ended on the road, we might seek compensation for the pain we're put in; if we lose profits we might have made but for the interference of some third party with a contract we've entered, we might recover that loss. Other pains, although concededly injurious, and even concededly "caused" by some blameworthy individual or entity, are not cognizable. Still others are also concededly injurious, but nevertheless not cognizable because they were not in fact caused by a culpable individual.There is, however, another type of suffering – another "category" of harms – toward which the law stands in a quite different relationship. As a number of critical legal scholars have argued, some of the sufferin...

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles raises a number of questions on the nature of justice, whether it is relative or absolute, as well as questions of the nature of gender roles. One cannot help but see that the characters of the play have deeply ingrained ideas about their gender roles, nor can one ignore the fact that true justice appears to be had in the end only by breaking the established rules of law and order. While on the surface it appears that the story seems to support