3. Further, neither the legislative power nor the executive power
ought to exercise the judicial function, but only appoint judges as
magistrates. It is the people who ought to judge themselves, through
those of the citizens who are elected by free choice as their
representatives for this purpose, and even specially for every process
or cause. For the judicial sentence is a special act of public
distributive justice performed by a judge or court as a constitutional
administrator of the law, to a subject as one of the people. Such an
act is not invested inherently with the power to determine and
assign to any one what is his. Every individual among the people being
merely passive in this relation to the supreme power, either the
executive or the legislative authority might do him wrong in their
determinations in cases of dispute regarding the property of
individuals. It would not be the people themselves who thus
determined, or who pronounced the judgements of "guilty" or "not
guilty" regarding their fellow-citizens. For it is to the
determination of this issue in a cause that the court has to apply the
law; and it is by means of the executive authority, that the judge
holds power to assign to every one his own. Hence it is only the
people that properly can judge in a cause- although indirectly
representatives elected and deputed by themselves, as in a jury.
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