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Chapter 4 explores the coroners’ jury, its makeup, its purpose and its relationship with the coroner. This section contends that the structure of the early modern coroners’ jury indicates that it was designed to provide the coroners’ inquest with local knowledge and expertise at the same time that it incorporated checks on the potential biases of local residents charged with investigating their neighbors. Focusing primarily on trial juries, traditional interpretations of early modern English judicial tribunals have highlighted their function as a site of negotiation between state and local society and between central and peripheral conceptions of justice. By examining a wider range of juries the chapter stresses the early modern jury's function as a site of state control. In an era with few official judicial officers, the effective maintenance of order required local information and local knowledge. In order to secure this crucial information without sacrificing state control over justice, a strategy of jury composition which blended geographical diversity with status qualifications was employed. Thus, the seeming contradiction in the early modern legal system witnessed by historians and contemporaries alike between discretion and impartiality was in fact a method of obtaining much needed local information without ceding the state's definition of justice to peripheral interests.

This chapter will first summarize how the book’s review of multiracial discrimination cases reveals the enduring power of white privilege and the continued societal problem with non-whiteness in any form. Specifically, the cases illustrate the perspective that non-whiteness taints rather than the concern that racial mixture itself is worrisome. Yet this insight is lost in the midst of the multiracial-identity scholars’ singular focus on promoting mixed-race identity. Multiracial victims of discrimination will be better served by legal analyses that seek to elucidate the continued operation of white supremacy. Such a focus will also better serve all Equality Law and public policies. But this can only be done by shifting away from a focus on personal individual identity recognition to a focus on group based racial realities. The chapter concludes with a proposal for an explicit “socio-political race” lens for analyzing matters of discrimination rather than the Personal Identity Equality perspective that misapprehends the social significance of race in the assessment of equality problems. The book’s emphasis on a socio-political race perspective meaningfully preserves an individual’s ability to assert a varied personal identity, while providing a more effective tool for addressing racism and pursuing equality.