Definition
Latin: "good and lawful men." A phrase drawn from the ancient common-law formula for jury qualification, designating persons who are competent in law to serve as jurors. The phrase appears in writs, jury summons, and early procedural texts as the standard description of a person eligible for jury service — one free from legal disqualification and of sufficient standing in the community to render a verdict.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of art encountered almost exclusively in historical sources — writs, pleadings, and treatises from the English common law tradition, particularly before the nineteenth century. Researchers will encounter it when working with early jury procedure, challenges to jurors, or the requirements for jury composition in colonial and early American courts.
The phrase carries doctrinal weight in two research contexts. First, it defines the baseline standard of juror competence at common law — a threshold that excluded women, attainted persons, aliens, and others under legal disability. Second, it appears in challenges to the array or poll, where a party contended that a juror or the whole panel did not consist of probi et legales homines. Understanding the phrase is therefore essential when reading early cases and pleadings that turn on the lawfulness of a jury's composition.
Modern jury qualification statutes have replaced this standard entirely. State and federal codes now specify citizenship, age, residency, and disqualification grounds in positive statutory terms. A researcher who encounters this phrase in a nineteenth-century American case is looking at a court still reasoning within the inherited common law framework, not a term with ongoing operative effect.
The phrase also appears in materials concerning grand juries, recognizances, and inquisitions, wherever common law procedure required that participating laymen meet a threshold of legal standing. Context matters: the same words carry slightly different procedural implications depending on whether they appear in a jury summons, a challenge for cause, or a writ reciting the jury's composition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence give a clean, minimal definition: "good and lawful men" competent to act as jurors. Bouvier expands the same core meaning — "good and lawful men; persons competent in point of law to serve on juries" — and supports it with references to Croke's Elizabethan and Jacobean reports, Hardres, and Bacon's Abridgement under the heading "Juries (A)." These citations collectively point to a well-established procedural standard rather than a contested doctrine; the dictionaries agree entirely on meaning. Neither source attempts to define the precise content of "lawfulness" for this purpose, treating competence as self-evident from the surrounding common law of juror qualification. Neither source addresses the eventual displacement of the phrase by statutory qualification requirements, which is the significant gap for modern researchers.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is English common law in origin and was carried into American colonial and early state practice. No American jurisdiction continues to use the Latin formula in modern jury procedure; statutory qualification regimes have uniformly superseded it. The phrase retains significance only in historical and comparative research contexts.