Uncivil rites

TEN YEARS AGO tomorrow, a Los Angeles jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murder. The vilification heaped onto the Simpson jurors by (mostly white) commentators—that they were antiwhite, sexist, and ignorant—''exemplified why the [trial by jury] system has lasted for eight centuries and will last for some time yet," according to London-based lawyer Sadakat Kadri. In ''The Trial" (Random House), Kadri offers a philosophical and witty history, beginning in ancient Egypt and Greece, of the criminal trial as public entertainment, among other things.

According to Kadri's analysis, trials originated as religious rituals, ''and though the incantations have turned to jargon and the cowls to robes," he opined in an e-mail interview, ''courtrooms are still places where wise scholars are expected to explain good and evil and rebalance a world gone awry." In other words, although we associate trials with deliberation and due process, they aren't all that different, in key respects, from the medieval trial by ordeal. Hence, notes Kadri, the almost existential tension so many Americans felt when Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden invited O.J. to try on the murderer's glove.

But what does Kadri mean about the jury trial's durability being demonstrated by the vilification of the Simpson jurors?

''In Aeschylus' 'Oresteia,' Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, pronounces herself unsure whether Orestes was right to kill his mother to avenge his father, and convenes a jury of 10 mortal Athenians to decide the case instead. The buck is still being passed four millennia later," he explained. ''Juries serve as social lightning rods, required to decide imponderable questions—e.g., whether a doubt is 'reasonable,' or a witness 'credible'—and to draw the heat at times of great communal tension." Because society needs scapegoats, Kadri concluded, juries ''perform a function far too valuable to allow them ever to be entirely replaced."

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.