The first thing New York State Chief Judge Judith Kaye did in her mid-1990s campaign to reform the state's jury system was commission a video to introduce jurors to the history and heritage of what she liked to call "our prized American jury." The video was done in high New York style—foundations made a couple of handsome grants, professional producers and cinematographers volunteered their services, distinguished law professors wrote the text, and celebrity tv journalists Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer narrated the story, which opened in medieval England and closed in a New York City courtroom. The praise all round was lavish.

Not long afterward a world-famous historian stopped by one of the courthouse ombudsman booths run by my Citizens Jury Project. (Judge Kaye's second reform was to eliminate all exemptions, thereby requiring every New Yorker, including the famous ones, to serve.) "I'm not normally one to defend the Church of Rome," thundered the eminent historian to our young law intern, who dutifully took down his complaint verbatim,

but that video's re-enactment of trial by ordeal is a disgrace. The clichÉd stooped monk in cowl luridly signing the cross over a drowning woman! Really! Bigoted tripe! Surely Judith knows it was the church that stopped the whole thing, ended trial by ordeal and compurgation. Not lawyers. It was the twelfth century, for God's sake. There weren't any lawyers, just canonists trained by the church. And it was the canonists who developed rational proofs of guilt and innocence and who set up standards of impartiality that became our standards.

Cowed momentarily though our law intern was, she logged onto her computer for a Lexis search—though she didn't really believe the court's video had it wrong. But the historian was right on: In 1215, the Lateran Council, convened by Pope Innocent III to regularize ecclesiastical law, forbade priests from participating in trials by ordeal. Since the ordeal required an authoritative interpretation of divine ...

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