The Law of the Other is an account of the English doctrine of the
mixed jury. Constable's excavation of the historical, rhetorical, and
theoretical foundations of modern law recasts our legal and sociological
understandings of the American jury and our contemporary conceptions of
law, citizenship, and truth.
The mixed jury doctrine allowed resident foreigners to have law suits
against English natives tried before juries composed half of natives and
half of aliens like themselves. As she traces the transformations in
this doctrine from the Middle Ages to its abolition in 1870, Constable
also reveals the emergence of a world where law rooted in actual
practices and customs of communities is replaced by law determined by
officials, where juries no longer strive to speak the truth but to
ascertain the facts.