Is There a ‘Jury’ in Islamic Law? The Twelve-Witness Lafīfiyya Testimony and the Limits of Judicial Discretion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Legal historian John Makdisi provocatively argued that the “English jury” may originate in the so-called lafīfiyya: a testimony of twelve ordinary Muslims whose concurring statements are considered probative in Islamic law of the Maghrib. This article examines the juristic conception and judicial application of the lafīfiyya. It first demonstrates how jurists of the Mālikī school (maḏhab) of Islamic law elaborated the lafīfiyya as regional “judicial practice” (ʿamal) with stipulations that invoked well-established Islamic legal concepts like circumstantial evidence (qarāʾin) and quorum (tawātur) – concepts contingent on a qāḍī’s assessment of them. The second part of the paper uses sharīʿa court case records from the first half of twentieth-century Morocco to examine judicial treatment of the lafīfiyya in practice. I argue that qāḍīs varyingly balanced their invocation of social discretion and textual stipulation to ensure that the lafīfiyya remained both socially reliable and doctrinally coherent. I focus especially on discretionary judicial assessment of social and/or logical “implausibility” of lafīfiyya testimonies through three overarching instances: urban vs. rural witnesses, testimonial identification and knowledge, and circumstances of bearing witness. In all cases, I show that Moroccan qāḍīs did not necessarily accept the witnesses’ statements as binding fact as a jury; rather, they preserved the lafīfiyya’s normative validity by upholding the threshold of logical plausibility. Ultimately, I leverage this discussion to argue for a more contingent understanding of Islamic adjudicative practice inclusive of both textual discourse and social temporality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".