Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, LIII:2 (Otoño, 2022), 267–288.
Andrew Otis
“Guilty of Publishing Only”: Jury Nullification as a
Legal Defense in the Eighteenth Century This article
contends that printers and journalists operating under British com-
mon law through the eighteenth century tended to be successful
when they encouraged jury nullification as a primary defence
against state libel lawsuits. Jury nullification, as it is called in the
United States, or jury independence or jury equity in the United
Kingdom, is the process by which a jury refuses to find a defendant
guilty even though the facts of the case point to conviction
beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury instead “votes its con-
ciencia,” regardless of what the law dictates.
Such was the determination in printer James Augustus
Hicky’s first trial for libel against Governor General Warren
Hastings of India in 1781. Despite overwhelming evidence accord-
ing to the law at the time, the jury found Hicky not guilty.
According to one account, the jury debated for thirty hours before
returning this verdict. Upon receiving it, Chief Justice Elijah
Impey of the Supreme Court of Bengal “flew into a prodigious
rage, violently declaring he would not suffer such a verdict to
be recorded, it being directly and positively in the teeth of the evi-
dence.” Impey ordered the jury to reconsider its verdict, pero el
jurors refused. One juror replied that he “had not hastily, nor
without due consideration, formed his opinion, nor should he
lightly change it, or be threatened into giving a different one.”
Notwithstanding any prejudice that the chief justice may have
felt toward Hicky, what caused him to fly into a “prodigious rage”
was the legal argument. Hicky, the founder of South Asia’s first
newspaper, specifically argued that the jury should consider
whether his alleged libel contained malicious intent, even though
legal precedent dictated that determining intent was solely a
judge’s prerogative. Hicky was so confident in his defense strategy
Andrew Otis received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of
Journalism in 2022. He is the author of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India’s First
Newspaper (Chennai, 2018).
© 2022 por el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts y The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia, Cª, https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01834
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| A N D R E W O T I S
268
that he fired his lawyer in the middle of the trial, saying, “I had
rather read my own defense. You do not seem to understand
my counsel.” Hicky told the jury, “The mere writing, printing
and publishing is no proof of guilt. The malicious or seditious ten-
dency must be proved.” The jury agreed. Hicky’s trial, sin embargo,
was but a single dramatic event within a larger trend.1
LIBEL TRIALS BETWEEN 1699 Y 1792 IN BRITAIN, BRITISH INDIA, Y
THE AMERICAN COLONIES To date, no scholar has performed a
quantitative analysis of either defense-counsel arguments, the link
between those arguments and acquittal, or acquittals that followed
judges’ directions to juries in eighteenth-century state libel trials
under British common law. State libel trials are important because
of their connection with the individual liberties that evolved in
anglophone societies at the time. The courtroom was a prime
location for private individuals and governments to contest the
boundaries of freedom or “liberty” of the press.2
In state libel trials, the government charged individuals with
sedition, obscenity, blasphemy, scandal, or criminal defamation.
“Seditious libel” prosecutions during this period have garnered signif-
icant scholarly attention, but the government was also likely to reach
indictments for written material deemed wicked, malicious, or false.
The doctrine of seditious libel grew out of the work of the Star
Chamber during the sixteenth century. Although never specifically
defined, it came to be associated with information that degraded
the social order by weakening people’s obedience to their leaders.3
This article examines state libel trials between 1699 y 1792
because of historical conditions during this period that enable
comparación. Por 1699, changes in laws and legal precedents
1 William Hickey (ed. Alfred Spencer), Memoirs of William Hickey. III. 1782–1790 (Londres,
1918), 161. William Hickey (no relation to James Augustus Hicky) had a reputation for inac-
curacy and exaggeration, but his account is largely corroborated by John Hyde, The Judicial
Notebooks of John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers, 1774–1798, June 26–29, 1781, available at
https://hydebooks.njit.edu. Hereafter Hyde’s Notebooks. Impey, a frequent target in Hicky’s
newspaper, called Hicky a “man among the dregs of the people” during one of Hicky’s trials.
See Hyde’s Notebooks, Junio 29, 1781.
2 Wendell R. Bird, Press and Speech under Assault: The Early Supreme Court Justices and the
Sedition Act of 1798, and the Campaign against Dissent (Nueva York, 2016), 36; Philip Hamburger,
“The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press,” Stanford Law
Revisar, XXXVII (1985), 669–670.
3 Hamburger, “Seditious Libel”; Bird, Press and Speech.
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T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
| 269
afforded British governments new avenues to regulate the press.
By all accounts, the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, el pasaje
of the Treason Trials Act of 1696, and two rulings—R v. Paine
(1696) and R v. Bear (1699)—by Lord Chief Justice John Holt
of the Court of King’s Bench (1689–1710) precipitated this
cambiar. In the seventeenth century, jurors had generally required
three criteria for successful convictions of libel—proof of defama-
tory content against individual(s), proof of publication or intent to
publish, and proof of a malicious state of mind (intent). Holt
relaxed the requirements for guilt by transferring the determina-
tion of intent from a jury to a judge. In R v. Paine, he declared
that written libel, even without an intent to publish, was sufficient
to warrant prosecution; the mere act of writing made an insult a
libel because it recorded a printer’s state of mind. In R v. Bear, él
required that indictments provide a defendant’s actual words or
their “sense and substance,” thereby allowing judges to “deter-
mine whether they be Scandalous or not.” In other words, el
court “tried” a person for libel in the very indictment, antes
the case even reached a jury. Por eso, a judge, not a jury, hecho
all decisions regarding libel, “because that determination [by a
judge] was considered a matter of law.” Juries determined only
whether a particular printer was involved in publishing an alleged
libel and whether the material in question targeted the person
named in the indictment.4
This period ended with the passage of Fox’s Libel Act of 1792
(32 Geo. III c. 60). The law, introduced by Charles James Fox, a
member of Parliament, allowed juries to render a verdict of guilty
or not guilty on the “whole matter put in issue,” rather than
requiring them to find a defendant guilty “merely on the proof
of publication.” Thus, Fox’s Libel Act allowed juries to consider
a defendant’s intent. Holt’s rulings lasted well into the eighteenth
siglo, sin embargo, because of the general conservatism of the
courts during this period, specifically that of Tory judges in the
4 When licensing lapsed, the Crown first used the law of treason, but the Treason Trials Act
brought new regulation to the prosecution of treason. Hamburger, “Seditious Libel,"
722–724, 737. Bird, Press and Speech, 46, 47; Hamburger, “Seditious Libel," 700; R v. Paine
(1696), 87 English Reports 584, disponible en https://home.heinonline.org/content/english
-reports/; R v. Bear (1699) (spelled Beare), 91 English Reports 1175; Bird, Press and Speech,
57; Paula R. Backscheider, “No Defense: Defoe in 1703,” Publications of the Modern Language
Asociación, CIII (1988), disponible en https://www.jstor.org/stable/462376, 274–284.
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270
| A N D R E W O T I S
latter half of the century eager to curb the press. Witness the opin-
ions of many leading judges and casebooks of the period, como
William Hawkins’ Pleas of the Crown (1716) and the opinions of
Chief Justice William Murray (the first Earl of Mansfield). Hamburger
states that Murray’s rulings in many important seditious libel trials
of the 1770s “depended almost entirely upon Holt’s decisions”—a
claim that has yet to be quantitatively investigated.5
Although this long period underwent many changes, it pro-
vides a framework to explore certain questions about the role of
juries and the construction of ideas about press freedom. Académicos
have hotly debated what exactly freedom or “liberty” of the press
meant in late eighteenth-century British and American culture.
Until recently, the consensus was that most individuals at the time
construed freedom of the press as merely freedom from prior
restraint. Yet Bird maintains that the public often understood free-
dom of the press in its modern sense, as freedom of speech and
freedom from prosecution for seditious libel. In an examination
of many newspapers and pamphlets of the time, Bird argued that
the dominant view of liberty of the press was broad. “Only a
declining minority, led by Crown judges, viewed those liberties
in the narrow way Blackstone purported to summarise.”6
Holt’s influential opinions tended seriously to restrict free
expresión. When William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the
Laws of England (1769), referred to freedom of the press, he meant
the freedom from prior restraint (printers not needing to be
licensed), not the freedom to print whatever they wanted. Oldham
and Bird have pointed to this doctrine as expounded by Mansfield in
the “Junius” libel trials of R v. Almon (1770), R v. Woodfall (1770),
and R v. Molinero (1770) (in which the three defendants were accused
of printing or selling letters critical of King George III, under the
pseudonym Junius). Mansfield used the narrow definition of press
freedom to bolster arguments against the press having widespread
5
John Hostettler, The Criminal Jury Old and New: Jury Power from Early Times to the Present
Day ( Winchester, REINO UNIDO., 2004), 92. Hamburger, “Seditious Libel," 742, 756. Scholars have
argued that Holt’s fairness in court contributed to the survival of his opinions. His admirers
included even critics like Tutchin, who was indicted for libel in 1704. According to Hamburger,
“Law and politics seemingly conspired to make a good part of the interpretation quite palatable”
(ibid., 754).
6 Leonard W. Exacción, Emergence of a Free Press (Nueva York, 1985); Bird, “Liberties of Press and
Discurso: “Evidence Does Not Exist to Contradict the … Blackstonian Sense” in Late 18th
Century England?” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, XXXVI (2016), 1.
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T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
rights to free speech. Such is the traditional Blackstone–Mansfield
definition of libel law.7
| 271
Si, as the literature suggests, judges typically perceived the
Blackstone–Mansfield interpretation and Holt’s opinions as estab-
lished precedent, printers’ only ostensible recourse was either to
contest publication or appeal to a jury’s wider sense of liberty.
On Holt’s terms, printers could be found guilty by merely
acknowledging that they had published an alleged libel and that
it targeted a purported individual. Faced with these constraints,
sin embargo, they had ample motivation to explore other legal tactics
to overcome prosecution. A counsel for the defense could prevail
by urging a jury to ignore the judge’s directive concerning publi-
cation and target and instead assess the intent or truth of an alleged
libel for itself and thus possibly “nullify” the law. Although juries
could return a verdict of not guilty regardless of a defense’s argu-
mentos, this article refers specifically to defense arguments, no
juries’ decisions. Scholars have suggested that printers turned to
arguments encouraging jury nullification as a central tactic, pero
until now, no one has attempted to perform a quantitative analysis
of printers’ tactics. This article seeks to discover the extent to
which defense counsels’ primary arguments in state libel prosecu-
tions between 1699 y 1792 relied on a broad understanding of
press freedom, y, if so, whether such arguments led to acquittals
more often than those that did not under common law. Examin-
ing the relationship between defense arguments and trial outcomes
during the eighteenth century increases our understanding of the
interactions between the state and the press and the way in which
liberties such as press freedoms were contested in the courts.8
Además, central to state libel trials is how evolving
notions of freedom of the press may have affected the directives
of judges to juries when summing up evidence. As the last
7 The “Junius” trials were named after the pseudonym of the anonymous writer behind
a ellos, Philip Francis, who later may have become a secret correspondent for Hicky’s Bengal
Gazette. For the identity of Junius, see Alvar Ellegård, A Statistical Method for Determining
Authorship: The Junius Letters 1769–1772 (Göteborg, 1962), 13; Otis, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette:
The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper (Chennai, 2018). Bird, The Revolution in Freedoms
of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act (Nueva York, 2020),
1. James Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century
(Chapel Hill, 1992).
8 Bird, Revolution in Freedoms, 31, 336; Clay S. Conrad, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a
Doctrine (Durham, 1988), 29–44.
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272
| A N D R E W O T I S
information that juries receive before they begin their delibera-
ciones, these directives can weigh heavily on the outcomes of cases.
Bird argued that most Crown judges agreed with the Blackstone–
Mansfield understanding of press freedom and applied Holt’s
opinions in their directions to juries. Además, the literature
widely holds that judges during this time period generally directed
juries to consider only publication and to disregard intent, aunque
heretofore no attempt has been made to quantify Crown judges’
use of this narrow definition in their summations to juries, o
whether judges’ directives were related to case outcomes in these
ensayos. This article explores these questions, también, in detail below.9
METHODOLOGY The data set for this analysis is based on a thor-
ough survey of case law involving state libel trials that reached petit
juries in Britain, British India, and the American colonies. Los datos
collection was not intended to represent an exhaustive listing of all
state libel jury trials in the archives from 1699 a 1792, but only
those cases available in printed case law books or digitized note-
books. Since all these libels were prosecuted by the state, ellos
are generally represented as R (technically meaning rex [king] o
regina [queen] but generically referring to the government) v.
Defendant, rather than Individual v. Defendant.10
The data were derived from four main sources—English
Informes, Howell’s State Trials, the Mansfield Manuscripts, y el
judicial notebooks of Justices John Hyde and Robert Chambers
of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal
Irwin A. Horowitz, “Jury Nullification: The Impact of Judicial Instructions, Arguments,
9
and Challenges on Jury Decision Making,” Law and Human Behavior, XII (1988), 439–453.
Bird notes one exception to the tendency among Crown judges, Charles Pratt (later Earl
of Camden) of the Court of Common Pleas (Press and Speech, 63); ídem, Revolution in Freedoms,
9–10, 93–114, 243–244; Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, II.
10 This data set excludes cases cited by other authors that did not appear to reach a petit
jury, such as R v. Campana (1700), 88 English Reports 1372; R v. James Drake (1706), 91 Inglés
Informes 790; R v. Derby, 92 English Reports 79; R v. Dodd (1724), 93 English Reports 136;
R v. Dormer (1726), 94 English Reports 9; R v. Pownell (1731), 25 English Reports 488; R v. Lofeild
(1731), 94 English Reports 399, 416, 442; R v. Mayer and Dowling (1731), 94 English Reports 345;
R v. Earbury (1732), 94 English Reports 509; R v. Roberts (1734), 94 English Reports 1084; R v.
Alderman (1756), 96 English Reports 880; R v. Almon (1765), 97 English Reports 94; R v. William
Bingley (1773) in The Case of William Bingley, Bookseller (Londres, 1773); and R v. Jolliffe (1791),
100 English Reports 1022. The data set also excludes trials incorrectly labeled by scholars as libel
(written) when they were, En realidad, concerned with defamation (spoken), such as R v. Herrero
(1725), 93 English Reports 135 and R v. Cómo (1725), 93 English Reports 136.
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| 273
T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
(Hyde’s Notebooks). Additional sources were also consulted when
printed volumes of case law reports were lacking—as was the case
for a few trials from the American colonies. The trials consulted
began in 1699 after Holt’s judicial precedents and ended in 1792
with the passage of Fox’s Libel Act (or with the Bill of Rights in
1791 in the United States). As noted earlier, Fox’s Libel Act
allowed jurors to deliberate on more than proof of publication;
for the first time, they could determine intent.11
These sources were chosen because they represent a broad
record of case law from this period. The Mansfield Manuscripts
are the notes of William Murray, the Lord Chief Justice of the
King’s Bench, de 1756 a 1788, reprinted by James Oldham
in the 1990s in a two-volume set. English Reports is a 178-volume
collection of more than 100,000 cases spanning the years 1220 a
1873. Printed between 1900 y 1932, it was intended to combine
hundreds of previously printed case law books into one series.12
Howell’s State Trials comprise thirty-four volumes’ worth of
trials relating to offenses against Great Britain from 1163 a 1820, como
composed by Thomas Bayly Howell and his son, Thomas Jones
Howell, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Este
authoritative work contains full records (to the greatest extent
recoverable) of trials such as high treason, defamation, murder, y
libel. Whenever possible, editors Cobbett and Holwell reprinted
the text of the indictments, examinations, closing arguments, y
judges’ directives to the jury verbatim. Although these accounts are
widely acknowledged to be truthful, the particular trials that they
recorded for posterity might reflect their own biases.
The large proportion of libel trials chosen by the Whiggish
editors is fortunate, given the subject matter of this article. Desde
common law used precedent from the British Empire at large,
Howell’s State Trials also sometimes incorporated Scotland, Irlanda,
the American colonies, India, and other British territories.13
11 Hostettler, Criminal Jury, 92. The end of this period has varied dates in the United States;
states adopted statutes allowing juries to determine intent at different times. Además, aunque
it lapsed three years later, the Sedition Act of 1798 allowed juries “to determine the law and
the fact” in libel cases. See Philip I. Blumberg, Repressive Jurisprudence in the Early American
República: The First Amendment and the Legacy of English Law (Nueva York, 2010).
12 Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts; 178 English Reports vii.
13 Thomas Bayly Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason
and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Londres, 1816), VI,
964 (hereinafter State Trials).
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| A N D R E W O T I S
Records from British India derive largely from Hyde’s Note-
books. Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata (modern Calcutta) sostiene
approximately seventy notebooks written between 1774 y 1798,
containing about 22,500 pages of conversations, testimonies, y
judgments from the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William
in Bengal, British India’s highest court at the time. These records
are a primary source of legal documents for early British India,
then ruled by the British East India Company. Justice John Hyde,
a junior court member, wrote most of these detailed proceedings
of cases and events, offering a wealth of information about local
gente, political intrigue, and everyday existence in early British
India, not to mention the tumultuous evolution of British law
allá. The Victoria Memorial has digitized the originals in Kolkata
(though they are not yet available to the public). Además, en
the late 1970s, the National Library of India made two microfilm
copies, one of which has been digitized and used for this study.14
Additional records of libel trials derive from various scattered
primary and secondary sources covering the American colonies.
The licensing laws that allowed prosecutors to avoid resorting to
libel prosecutions were sometimes in force in the American colo-
nies (after they had lapsed in Britain), and state assemblies often
chose to prosecute libel without resorting to the courts, especially
after a jury found John Peter Zenger not guilty of libeling New
York Governor William Cosby in 1735, demonstrating to author-
ities that colonial juries were potentially not reliable.15
Determining exactly which legal defenses printers and their
counsels employed in libel trials requires a close reading of the texts
14 Tomas M.. Curley of Bridgewater State University imported one of the microfilm
collections to the United States in the 1980s. This collection has been digitized. See Carol
Siri Johnson, “Hydebooks—Judicial Notebooks of John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers,"
disponible en https://hydebooks.njit.edu. The other collection remains at the National Library
of India, in degraded condition.
15 Michael G. Kammen, “Colonial Court Records and the Study of Early American
Historia: A Bibliographical Review,” American Historical Review, LXX (1965), 732–739;
Blumberg, Repressive, 55. Zenger’s trial may have had a chilling effect on colonial authorities;
later colonial libel prosecutions usually occurred in front of state assemblies, where printers
were indicted, tried, and sentenced, rather than in the courts. See Harold L. nelson,
“Seditious Libel in Colonial America,” American Journal of Legal History, III (1959), 160–172;
Livingston Rowe Schuyler, The Liberty of the Press in the American Colonies before The Revolu-
tionary War, with Particular Reference to Conditions in the Royal Colony of New York (Nueva York,
1905). Stanley Nider Katz (ed.), A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger,
Printer of the New York Weekly Journal (Cambridge, Masa., 1972).
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T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
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describing the cases and the oral arguments of defense counsels. Este
article’s criteria for categorizing different arguments is rigorous. Solo
words or phrases explicitly signifying a defense strategy counted as
evidence of the defense’s argument. Además, arguments had to
be made at the trial, not just in a venue external to it, such as a pam-
phlet or in a newspaper.16
RESULTS A thorough search of sources for Britain, British India, y
the American colonies discovered sixty-eight state libel jury trials
entre 1699 y 1792. Defense arguments generally comprised five
categories—intent, truth, freedom of the press, publicación, and target.
Intent, truth, and press freedom can be classified as “nullification argu-
ments” because they encouraged juries to weigh the content of the
supposed libel and the printer’s state of mind, to decide law as well
as fact, and to deliver general verdicts that could flout Holt’s precedents.
Publication and target were categorized as “standard arguments”
because they operated within the legal framework that judges
favored. In these cases, defense counsels argued either that their clients
did not print, publish, or write the libel in question (the publication
argumento), or that the content did not libel the person alleged in the
indictment (the target argument). Desde, according to Holt’s prece-
abolladuras, juries had to be convinced only that a defendant was involved
in writing or printing the libel and that the libel applied to the person
alleged in the indictment, the attorney could deny these facts in an
attempt to clear the client. By working within the framework that
judges and prosecutions laid out, these standard arguments did not
challenge juries to contravene the law.
A defense based on intent carries the implication that the printer
did not have a malicious state of mind. A defense founded on a truth
claim means that the written material was not libelous because it was
true. A defense touting freedom of the press suggests that the words in
question were written to benefit society, specifically to speak truth to
fuerza. A defense mounted on the issue of publication means that the
accused was not involved in writing, printing, or publishing the libel,
and one focused on a target means that the libel did not refer to the
person identified by the prosecution (the defense might argue that
someone else was the target).
16 An appendix with details of the trials included in the dataset is available at: https://doi
.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20291580.
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276
| A N D R E W O T I S
Defenses could use more than one argument per trial. Para
instancia, a printer could claim both that an alleged libel was true
and that it did not target the alleged individual. Cifra 1 provides an
overview of the frequency of the different approaches, a excepción de
cases in which the defense arguments remain unknown. Tenga en cuenta que
the number of arguments exceeds the number of trials with known
defensas (listed in the appendix), since defenses could adduce more
than one argument at a trial.
Defense arguments about intent were the most common; those
about truth were infrequent, potentially because many libel trials
did not involve matters of fact so much as general criticisms of the
gobierno. Until the Zenger case, truth was an exceptional
nullification argument since it was thought to aggravate a libel.
Freedom of the press was an argument that went beyond truth or
intent, involving theoretical concepts regarding the value of the
press for society. This argument, first proposed obliquely in Tutch-
in’s trial of 1704, became increasingly more prominent in the latter
half of the eighteenth century as Enlightenment ideals became
widespread. Freedom of the press was closely intertwined with free-
dom of speech, which specified that individuals could speak freely
provided they did not falsify or maliciously defame. Defenses
evoked this argument even if they did not evoke one for truth or
intent; eso es, a defense tacitly admitting libel could nonetheless
Higo. 1 Defense Arguments in State Libel Jury Trials, 1699–1792
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T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
| 277
attempt to convince a jury that a guilty verdict would have a perni-
cious effect on the ability of the press to act on the public’s behalf.17
Defense Strategies—Comparative Numbers and Outcomes A chi-
square goodness-of-fit test indicates no significant difference
between the proportion of nullification arguments (thirty-five)
and that of standard and other arguments (twenty-seven) en el
total number of libel cases:
χ2 1; n ¼ 62
d
Þ ¼ 1:03; p ¼ n:s:
Por eso, defense counsels did not favor a broad understanding of
freedom of the press in state libel trials. They appear to have used
standard and nullification arguments in nearly equal measure.
A chi-square test for independence, with Yates’ Continuity
Correction, indicates, sin embargo, a significant relationship between
defense arguments and trial outcomes. Defense counsels who
relied only on nullification arguments (sixteen) were more likely
than defense counsels who used standard arguments alone or with
nullification arguments (nineteen), to win acquittal for their clients.
At the p < .05 level,
ð
Þ ¼ 6:438; p ¼ :011:
χ2 1; n ¼ 35
Hence, a broad understanding of press freedom could anticipate
more success in libel cases than a narrow understanding of it.
Figure 2 shows the breakdown of defense arguments. Sixteen
encouraged jury nullification exclusively—employing truth, intent,
or freedom of the press arguments—openly admitting or not
contesting that the defendants had printed the material in question;
in nine of them, the defendants were found not guilty or were
acquitted in some way. In seven trials, the defense counsels took a
mix-and-match approach, combining jury-nullification arguments
with standard arguments. They contended that the defendants did
not write the material in question or did not target the person in
question, but that if they had done so, the result would not have been
libel because it would have been true or not malicious. Six of these
seven defendants were found guilty. One of them, John Tutchin
(1704), was acquitted, though on a technicality (see discussion). In
twelve other trials, the defense mounted standard arguments alone,
17 Larry D. Eldridge, “Before Zenger: Truth and Seditious Speech in Colonial America,
1607–1700,” American Journal of Legal History, XXXIX (1995), 337–358; Bird, Revolution in
Freedoms, 107–193.
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| A N D R E W O T I S
278
Fig. 2 Results of State Libel Jury Trials, 1699–1792, by Defense
Arguments Employed
NOTE The top division of each bar represents convictions, the bottom division some form of
acquittal.
arguing from publication eight times and from target four times. In
only one of these trials, R v. Elizabeth Nutt (1728), did it earn
acquittal. The jury thought the prosecution to have been overly
harsh. Nutt, the owner of a pamphlet shop, had been bedridden
when the alleged libel was sold and therefore had no part in it.18
18 Of the sixteen trials in which the defense solely used jury-nullification arguments seven
were found guilty: R v. William Fuller (1702), R v. John Checkley (1724), R v. John Williams
(1764), R v. John Wilkes (1764–1770a), R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1774a), R v. John Horne
Tooke (1777), R v. James Augustus Hicky (1781c). Nine were found not guilty/acquitted: R v. John
Peter Zenger (1735), R v. William Owen (1752), R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1770), R v. John Miller
(1770), R v. James Augustus Hicky (1781a), R v. William Davies Shipley (1783–1784), R v. John
Stockdale (1789), R v. Edward Topham (1790–1791), and Commonwealth v. Edmund Freeman
(1791). Of the seven trials in which the defense mixed standard and nullification arguments six
were found guilty: R v. James Dundas (1712), R v. John Clarke (1729), R v. Richard Francklin (1731),
R v. John Almon (1770), R v. Lord George Gordon (1787a), and R v. Robert Bostock (1790).
The eight trials in which the defense used publication arguments were R v. Elizabeth Nutt
(1728), R v. Robert Knell (1729), R v. John Wilkes (1764–1770b), R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall
(1774b), R v. John Williams (1774), R v. Henry Baldwin (1776), R v. Henry Bate
(1782b), and R v. Thomas Wilkins (1787) ( Wilkins also argued that he did not live in the
location indicated in the plaint). The four trials in which the defense used target arguments
were R v. John Matthews (1719), R v. Edgar (1738), R v. Jenour (1741), and R v. Lord George
Gordon (1787b) (Matthews also argued that the prosecution used the incorrect statute in the
indictment). For the Nutt acquittal, see 94 English Reports 208.
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T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
| 279
The defense’s arguments in twenty-nine of the trials are
unknown. Only three of them ended in acquittal. In four further
trials, the defense’s arguments are difficult to categorize. In R v.
Samuel Mulford (1714), the defense pleaded that the court did
not have jurisdiction to hear the trial. Mulford was found guilty.
In R v. Edmund Curll (1727), R v. Chevalier D’Eon (1764), and R v.
Henry Bate (1782a), the defendants did not offer any evidence in
their favor. Curll and D’Eon were found guilty and Bate was
acquitted.19
Crown Judges’ Directives and Outcomes A chi-square goodness-
of-fit test indicates a significant difference between the propor-
tion of judges directing juries to consider publication only—thus
treating Holt’s opinions as settled precedent (twenty-two)—and
the proportion also mentioning questions of publication and
intent (four):
χ2 1; n ¼ 26
ð
Þ ¼ 2:462; p < :001:
The results suggest that Crown judges were significantly more
likely to direct juries to consider publication only than to con-
sider intent. In other words, judges overwhelmingly presented
Holt’s opinions as established precedent to juries (see Figure 3).
The data appear to be insufficient, however, to determine the
extent to which Crown judges’ interpretations of libel precedent
influenced trial outcomes, although in aggregate, judges’ direc-
tions do not seem to have been related to juries’ verdicts. In
twenty-two cases, including five in which juries were also directed
to convict, judges directed juries to consider only whether the
printer published the alleged libel and who its target was, not its
intent. Eight of these cases resulted in acquittal. In three cases,
judges directed the jury to convict, but no record remains of
whether a judge directed a jury to consider intent. In only four
other cases—R v. John Matthews (1719), R v. Henry Sampson
Woodfall (1774b), R v. John Stockdale (1789), and Commonwealth
v. Freeman (1791)—did a judge indicate that a jury had the power
to determine intent. In thirty-nine cases, no record of the judges’
directives remains. The data suggest that Crown judges did indeed
19 R v. Samuel Mulford (1714), Nelson, “Seditious Libel,” 166; R v. Edmund Curll (1727),
State Trials, XVII, 160 and 93 English Reports 849; R v. Chevalier D’Eon (1764), 97 English
Reports 955; R v. Henry Bate (1782a), Mansfield Manuscripts, II, 855.
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| A N D R E W O T I S
Fig. 3
Judges’ Directions to Juries (Where Recorded) in State Libel
Jury Trials, 1699–1792
NOTE The top division of each bar indicates conviction and the bottom acquittal.
attempt to proscribe the role of juries but that judges’ directives
and case outcomes bear little connection (Figure 3).20
DISCUSSION The evidence suggests that nullification arguments—
especially nullification arguments alone—were linked to acquittals
at a rate significantly higher than were standard arguments.
Defense arguments that did not contest publication appear to have
20 Of the twenty-two cases in which the judge directed the jury to consider publication and
target, fourteen defendants were found guilty: R v. William Fuller (1702), R v. John Clarke
(1729), R v. Richard Francklin (1731), R v. John Williams (1764), R v. John Almon (1770),
R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1774a), R v. John Williams (1774), R v. John Wilkie (1776),
R v. John Horne Tooke (1777), R v. Lord George Gordon (1787a), R v. Thomas Wilkins
(1787), R v. Lord George Gordon (1787b), R v. Philip Withers (1790), and R v. Robert Bostock
(1790). Eight were acquitted: R v. John Tutchin (1704), R v. John Peter Zenger (1735), R v.
William Owen (1752), R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1770), R v. John Miller (1770), R v. James
Augustus Hicky (1781a), R v. William Davies Shipley (1783–1784), and R v. Edward Topham
(1790–1791).
Of the three defendants of which the judge directed the jury to convict, (with no record
of the judge’s directions on intent), R v. Edgar (1738) and R v. James Augustus Hicky (1781c)
were found guilty, and R v. Woodfall (1740) was acquitted. Of the four defendants of which
the judge directed the jury to consider their intent, two were found guilty—R v. John Matthews
(1719) and R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1774b)—and two were acquitted—R v. John Stockdale
(1789) and Commonwealth v. Freeman (1791).
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T H E JU R Y N U LL I FI CA T IO N D E F E N S E
| 281
encouraged juries to consider a broad interpretation of press
freedoms. As the century progressed, appealing to a jury’s sense
of personal liberty became a primary way to defeat libel prosecu-
tions. Although defenses based on truth and intent began almost
immediately after Holt’s rulings, as seen in Fuller’s and Tutchin’s
trials of 1702 and 1704, the first explicit appeals to a broad view of
press liberty occurred in the trials of Richard Francklin in 1731 and
of Zenger in 1735. It became more established in the “Junius”
trials of 1770 (see below). This article echoes the work of other
scholars who find that reference to press freedoms became increas-
ingly common as the century progressed.21
The frequency of jury nullification in libel trials is notable
considering its infrequency in other types of trials. Juries generally
reinforced upper-class power; 75 percent of adult males were too
poor to qualify as jurors. Juries were also generally favorable to the
prosecution. In the 1770s, future United States President John
Adams estimated that only in “one out of a thousand cases would
the jury be at a loss about the law,” indicating that juries were usu-
ally well aware of the legal issues. As Green wrote, “the seditious
libel trials of the end of the eighteenth century constitute an
important chapter in the history of freedom of the press and the
growth of democratic government.”22
The findings herein also reveal that judges tended heavily
toward Holt’s opinion that only the publication and the target
of an alleged libel were relevant to jury deliberations, and that
any determination of malicious intent belonged exclusively to
judges. Judges’ directives also appear to have had little bearing
on juries’ decisions. Defendants were acquitted in nearly half the
trials in which a judge advised a jury to consider publication only
or to convict. In only four trials during this ninety-year period did
a judge instruct the jury to consider a printer’s intent. In two of
those trials, the jury voted to acquit and in the other two to con-
vict. These data add further evidence to Bird’s argument that a
21 Bird, Revolution in Freedoms.
22 Douglas C. Hay, “The Class Composition of the Palladium Of Liberty: Trial Jurors in
the Eighteenth Century,” in James S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green (eds.), Twelve Good
Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800 (Princeton, 1988), 305–357;
Steven Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America
(New York, 2010), 34; Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on
the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (Chicago, 1985), 153; Hostettler, Criminal Jury, 318.
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282
| A N D R E W O T I S
broad conception of press freedom was popular in eighteenth-
century British society and that judges and juries indeed disagreed
about it.
Notwithstanding any unique circumstances surrounding each
of the trials surveyed, a general trend is evident. Cases in which
defenses used nullification arguments won acquittals more often
than did those that featured standard arguments. The use of
nullification in these trials follows a pattern of juries nullifying
the law when they considered punishment unfair or dispropor-
tionate to the crime. Jury nullification was a significant factor
under the British Bloody Code of the eighteenth century, which
dictated harsh penalties for minor offenses; many juries did not want
to send individuals to their deaths for minor property crimes.23
The very wording of verdicts, as well as discussions between
judges and juries about it, affords a glimpse into the rationale
behind juries’ decisions. Judges often repeatedly queried juries
when they returned verdicts along the lines of “guilty of publish-
ing only.” For example, despite assurances from Chief Justice
Mansfield in R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1770) “that if there
was indeed nothing criminal in Junius’s letter, [the jury’s] verdict
of guilty would do no harm,” the jury repeatedly stated that it
found Woodfall guilty only of printing and publishing his newspa-
per. Although willing to acknowledge the fact of publication, the
jury did not want to leave the determination of seditious intent to
the bench. Likewise, in the long conversation between Justice
Buller and the jury in the trial record of R v. William Davies Shipley
(1783/4), the jury strongly resisted attempts to interpret their ver-
dict of “guilty of publishing only” as a more comprehensive guilty
verdict.24
Defenses that used standard arguments of publication and tar-
get were more often forced to contest facts rather than ideas. In
many of the cases, prosecutors attempted to demonstrate first,
through witness testimony, that a defendant printed, published,
or sold the alleged libel before bringing other evidence to bear.
Establishing intent, however, was murkier; it involved ascertaining
a printer’s state of mind. Whenever defenses contested publication,
23 Conrad, Jury Nullification, 5; Peter King and Richard Ward, “Rethinking the Bloody
Code in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Capital Punishment at the Centre and on the Periphery,”
Past & Present, 228 (2015), 159–205.
24 State Trials, XX, 902, 921; XXI, 950–955.
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they had to show that defendants did not know anything about
the content of the allegedly libelous material, despite publishing,
printing, or selling it. Juries tended to be unsympathetic with
defenses that relied on that argument. Juries repeatedly convicted
printers who denied knowledge of publication or who argued
they did not target the individuals alleged. As noted earlier, the
case of R v. Elizabeth Nutt (1728) was one of the rare successes
of a contested publication, Nutt being bedridden and uninvolved
with the business at the time.25
Juries were also not generally sympathetic to combinations of
standard and nullification arguments, most likely because they
found it awkward to deny knowledge of an alleged libel and to
deny its malicious or seditious intent in the same breath. For
instance, even though Lord George Gordon (1787) argued that
the prosecution had no evidence that he wrote an alleged libel
nor that he had any malicious or seditious intent, the jury found
him guilty. Likewise, in the “Junius” trials (1770), John Almon,
who contested publishing and having any knowledge of it, as well
as having any ill intent, was found guilty. Henry Sampson Wood-
fall and John Miller, however, who used only the nullification
argument, were acquitted, even though all three of them pub-
lished or sold the same material.26
25 For examples of witness testimony for the prosecution, see R v. William Fuller (1702),
State Trials, XIV, 533; R v. John Tutchin (1704); R v. Richard Francklin (1731), State Trials, XVII,
631–632; R v. William Owen 1752, State Trials, XVIII, 1222; R v. John Wilkes; R v. John Almon
(1770), State Trials, XX, 829; R v. John Miller (1770), State Trials, XX, 878–879; R v. Henry
Sampson Woodfall (1770), State Trials, XX, 898; R v. William Davies Shipley (1783–1784), State
Trials, XXI, 891–892; R v. Thomas Wilkins (1787), State Trials, XXII, 211; R v. Lord George
Gordon (1787a) 187; R v. Lord George Gordon (1787b) 226; R v. John Stockdale (1789), State
Trials, XX, 252; for the precedent regarding publication explicitly noted, R v. Dodd (1724),
93 English Reports 136; for denied knowledge of publication, R v. James Dundas (1712), R v.
Robert Knell (1728), R v. Richard Francklin (1731), R v. John Wilkes (1764–1770b), R v. Almon
(1770), R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1774b), R v. John Williams (1774), R v. Henry Baldwin
(1776), R v. Henry Bate (1782b), R v. Lord George Gordon (1787a), R v. Thomas Wilkins (1787);
for denied knowledge of target, R v. John Matthews (1719). R v. John Clarke (1729), R v. Edgar
(1738), R v. Jenour (1741), R v. Lord George Gordon (1787b), R v. Robert Bostock (1790).
26 For Gordon, see State Trials, XXII, 198, 208; for Almon, State Trials, XX, 832–833, 838.
Almon’s was one of the few cases to record a jury’s questions to the judge. The jury asked
whether the master of a shop was liable for a servant selling a pamphlet without his or her
knowledge. Judge Mansfield replied that evidence of a sale, even without the master’s knowl-
edge, was sufficient to convict the master of libel. Despite Mansfield’s instructions for the jury
to find only matters of fact, Miller’s defense openly admitted the printing of the Junius letters,
arguing that the jury must be convinced of “sedition in the intention” of his printing (State
Trials, XX, 985). Woodfall’s case is discussed later.
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The alleged offenses in many cases involved charges of sedi-
tious libel of government. In 1724, John Checkley was tried for
promoting Anglicanism over the Puritanism adopted by the
Massachusetts Colony. He claimed to have “no Malice in [his]
Heart, nor designed anything against the Government.” The jury,
apparently swayed by his arguments, attempted to return a special
verdict, guilty if Checkley’s pamphlet “be a false and scandalous
Libel” and not guilty if it be “not a false and scandalous Libel.”
The judge, one of the complainants against Checkley, pronounced
him guilty upon receiving this verdict.27
In the nine cases when defendants successfully employed a
nullification strategy, six were about seditious libel, such as
Zenger’s (1735). William Owen (1752), who wrote a pamphlet
criticizing abuse of power by members of Parliament (1725), was
acquitted despite the judge’s directions to find him guilty. When
pressed on their decision, a juror replied, “That is our verdict, my
lord, and we abide by it.” John Stockdale published a pamphlet
criticizing the House of Commons’ impeachment of former
Governor General of Bengal Warren Hastings (1789). Stockdale’s
defense told the jury that “the liberty of the press would be an
empty sound” if he were to be convicted. Edward Topham was
accused of printing that Earl Cowper had committed “unmanly
vices and debaucheries” (1790–1791). Finally, Edmund Freeman
was prosecuted for accusing a Massachusetts state senator of drunk-
enness and of causing his wife’s death (1791). Freeman’s case hung
on whether the defense could convince the jury that Freeman
intended to write that the state senator did not literally murder
his wife but figuratively “murdered [her] by his cruelty.” The jury
agreed with the defense’s interpretation and found Freeman not
guilty.28
27 Edward Farwell Slafter, John Checkley; or, The Evolution of Religious Tolerance in Massachu-
setts Bay. Including Mr. Checkley’s Controversial Writings; His Letters and Other Papers (Boston,
1897), II, 12, 72, 57, 74.
28
Seditious libel: R v. John Peter Zenger (1735), R v. William Owen (1752), R v. Henry Sampson
Woodfall (1770), R v. John Miller (1770), R v. William Davies Shipley (1783–1784), R v. John
Stockdale (1789). State Trials, XVIII, 1228–1229; XXII, 281; 100 English Reports 931–932.
Harrison Gray Otis, defense lawyer for Freeman, told the jury, “If you are not convinced that
it means to say Mr. Gardiner [the state senator] did with malice aforethought murder his late
wife, you must acquit the defendant,” Independent Chronicle (Boston, Mass.), 10 Mar. 1791, 1. For
a fairly full account of the Freeman trial, see the Independent Chronicle (Boston, Mass.), 24 Feb. to
24 Mar. 1791, printed serially.
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Beyond the cases above, the findings are consistent with the
claim that Holt standardized judges’ directions for most of the
eighteenth century. Notably, in three trials, juries returned a
verdict in some form similar to “guilty of publishing only,” a direct
sign that juries were cognizant of printers’ arguments for nullifica-
tion. In R v. John Tutchin (1704), the jury returned a verdict of
“Guilty of composing and publishing, except the writing.” After
much discussion between defense counsel and court, the court
declared a guilty verdict. However, Tutchin was later acquitted
due to a technical error in the prosecution’s legal plaint. As noted
earlier, in Woodfall’s Junius-letter trial, the defense conceded print-
ing but argued intent and freedom of the press. The jury returned a
verdict of “guilty of printing and publishing only.” After conversa-
tion between judges and advocates about the meaning of the ver-
dict, and whether the word only negated the court’s ability to
impose judgment, Chief Justice Mansfield declared a mistrial and
called for a new jury, but Woodfall was never retried.29
In R v. William Davies Shipley (1783/4), better known as the
case of the Dean of Asaph, the defendant stood accused of
publishing a pamphlet that advocated reform of the British elec-
toral system. The jury at first returned a verdict of “guilty of pub-
lishing only.” After intense pressure from Justice Buller in favor of
a blanket guilty verdict, however, the verdict changed to “guilty of
publishing, but whether a Libel or not the Jury do not find,” a
clear refusal to allow the judge to determine intent. Nonetheless,
Buller declared a guilty verdict, but Shipley’s defense counsel
appealed the decision to the Court of King’s Bench on the
grounds that Buller had misdirected the jury. The Court of King’s
Bench acquitted Shipley on a technicality, an error in the indict-
ment. Shipley’s lawyer sent records of the trial to Fox, who even-
tually introduced his bill to reform the libel law, thus ending the
period of jury nullification by effectively allowing juries to con-
sider intent.30
Juries appear to have undergone some initial confusion about
the new law. In R v. Alexander Whyte (1793), the jury returned a
29 State Trials, XX, 921. Woodfall’s case was the third of the four “Junius” trials. In the
similar trial R v. Woodfall (1774b), the jury returned a verdict of guilty of publishing the
paper but not a libel. This time Mansfield took the verdict to mean guilty (99 English
Reports 915).
30 State Trials, XXI, 950–955; Hostettler, Criminal Jury, 92.
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286
verdict of “not guilty of publishing,” which the judge interpreted
to mean not guilty. In R v. Walter Berry and James Robertson (1793),
the jury returned a verdict of “printed & published” for one
defendant and “published only” for the other. The court inter-
preted both verdicts to mean guilty. In the case of R v. Daniel Isaac
Eaton (1793), the jury appeared to have been totally unaware of
the new Act, returning the verdict “guilty of publishing, but not
with a criminal intention.” When the court’s stenographer refused
to record the verdict as not guilty, the court temporarily sent the
printer back to jail. Eaton’s second trial resulted in a nearly iden-
tical verdict, and he was not retried.31
Although it was a victory for advocates of freedom of the
press, Fox’s Libel Act may have made it easier to obtain convic-
tions since juries may no longer have felt that freedom of the press
was at stake in each trial. The King’s Bench rolls indicate an aver-
age of two seditious libel prosecutions a year from 1702 to 1789,
many of which probably did not reach a jury, but there were a full
forty-eight “informations” and indictments at the King’s Bench in
the decade after Fox’s Libel Act. Although some of them might
have come from prosecutors reacting to the threats from the
French Revolution in 1789, the data indeed indicate an increased
rate of seditious libel trials after the Act appeared. Howell’s State
Trials recorded at least eleven seditious-libel jury trials within
two years of the Act’s passage, a rate far higher than that witnessed
during the preceding century. According to Lobban, the Act also
empowered judges to give their opinions in cases based on con-
text. Since juries could now determine intent, judges increasingly
felt free to pronounce their opinion on the nature of the alleged
libels. This practice served as a device to influence juries.32
31 State Trials, XXII, 1249–1250; XXIII, 92; XXII, 780, 823.
32 Hostettler, Criminal Jury, 92; Bird, Revolution in Freedoms, 198; Philip Harling, “The Law
of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832,” Historical Journal, XLIV (2001), 109;
Michael Lobban, “From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing
Face of Political Crime c1770–1820,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, X (1990), 309, 321; R v.
Patrick William Duffin and Thomas Lloyd (1792), State Trials, XXII, 317; R v. Thomas Paine
(1792), State Trials, XXII, 357; R v. Daniel Isaac Eaton (1793), State Trials, XXII, 753; R v.
Daniel Isaac Eaton (1793), State Trials, XXII, 785; R v. James Perry, John Lambert, and James Gray
(1793), State Trials, XXII, 953; R v. Daniel Holt (1793), State Trials, XXII, 1189; R v. Daniel
Holt (1793); R v. Alexander Whyte (1793), State Trials, XXII, 1237; R v. Archibald Hamilton
Rowan (1793–1794), State Trials, XXII, 1033; R v. James Thomson Callender, Walter Berry,
and James Robertson (1793), State Trials, XXIII, 79; R v. Daniel Isaac Eaton (1794), State Trials,
XXIII, 1013.
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LIMITATIONS IN THE DATA Records of many state trials may not
have survived. Some trials may be absent from Howell’s State Trials
since the editors sourced material from publicly available accounts
such as reprints in booklets or contemporary newspapers. The
reliance on public accounts may bias the sample toward more
controversial trials in which juries returned surprising verdicts. This
limitation, however, is mitigated by the large number of cases avail-
able in the English Reports and the completeness of Hyde’s Notebooks.
But records for the lower courts are often unavailable or inaccessible,
and other state libel trials in court archives through the United
Kingdom and United States are beyond the scope of this study.
Furthermore, the great change in ideals and philosophies
involving fundamental rights such as life, liberty, and the right
to property that occurred during the course of the eighteenth
century are unavoidably compressed in a study that incorporates
trials from the entire century. Important differences in what con-
stituted libel no doubt existed throughout this period, as a general
tolerance for printed expression increased. Nonetheless, the data
indicate a surprising consistency in defenses’ legal arguments
despite societal and intellectual progress.
The categorization of defenses’ legal arguments involves sim-
plification. Nuance can be sacrificed when legal arguments are
reduced to overarching types without regard to all the circum-
stances relevant to each trial. Furthermore, case outcomes were
not dependent merely on arguments. Although cases in which
defenses employed nullification arguments saw a better rate of
acquittal than did those employing the standard argument, this
relationship was not necessarily causal. Records of jury delibera-
tions or the rationale behind verdicts were generally unrecorded;
trial transcriptions often described a judge’s summation followed
by the jury’s verdict, leaving the precise arguments that juries
found most persuasive difficult to ascertain. For a nullification
defense to be successful, a jury had to be convinced of its power
to judge law as well as fact. Other circumstances, such as printers’
reputations or judges’ proclivities, could also affect outcomes.33
33 For examples of trial records recording a jury’s verdict immediately following a judge’s
summation (without record of the jury asking questions of judges), see R v. William Fuller
(1702), State Trials, XIV, 536; R v. Richard Francklin (1731), State Trials, XVII, 676; R v. John
Matthews (1719), State Trials, XV, 1394: R v. John Peter Zenger (1735), State Trials, XVII, 723; R
v. William Owen (1752), State Trials, XVIII, 1228–1229; R v. Henry Sampson Woodfall (1770),
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This study expands the literature by proposing a new way of
looking at early protections of freedom of the press in courtrooms.
The data suggest that printers appealed to jurors’ sense of justice to
argue for acquittals that contravened the acceptable evidence. In
response to such defenses, jurors often rebelled against their
restricted role to nullify the law, convinced of the injustice of con-
victing printers without considering intent. The success of these
legal arguments adds to a growing body of literature suggesting
that support for the press was widespread. This study maintains
that printers in eighteenth-century anglophone society employed
jury nullification in courtrooms as a prime and comparatively
successful legal defense.
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State Trials, XX, 921; R v. John Miller (1770), State Trials, XX, 896; R v. John Horne Tooke
(1777), State Trials, XX, 764; R v. Lord George Gordon (1787a), State Trials, XX, 209; R v. Lord
George Gordon (1787b), State Trials, XX, 231; R v. Thomas Wilkins (1787), State Trials, XXII,
213; R v. John Stockdale (1789), State Trials, XXII, 293. An exception is R v. John Almon (1777),
State Trials, XX, 838, in which the jury is recorded asking Mansfield questions.
