Ever hear of jury nullification? If you are ever called to serve on a jury, you might well want to know more about it. An good article about it can be found here.

Basically, jury nullification is a right given to every citizen of this country by the founding fathers to use their conscience and, if they do not agree with a law, they may also judge the law itself by voting on a verdict according to their conscience, rather than the law as it is written. The jury can acquit a defendant if they disagree with the law under which the defendant is being convicted.

Judges and prosecutors rarely if ever inform a jury of this and instead tell a juror to consider only the facts, yet it is a very important right to all of us. The people are the final gauntlet through which a law must pass, and as jurors they can protest that law.

Read the article above; there are a lot of other places where this information can be found online as well, but this page explains it nicely.

You often see those bogus emails telling about the "cases", non-existent, of the various ways in which people abuse the legal system by entering into litigation with the intent of making as much money as they can out of it. The following newsletter comes from StellaAwards.com, a website devoted to researching legitimate cases of such abuse, and named for the woman who really started it all with the lawsuit against McDonald's, based on spilling a cup of hot coffee into her lap and burning herself. Readon for more such "mischief"... and visit the Stella Awards site (linked at the bottom) for some real eye-openers.