Justice at the plow

What happened

Thomas Olive came to West Jersey from Wellingborough in England as one of the Quaker proprietors, sat as a justice of the provincial court at Burlington, and later served as Speaker of the Assembly and deputy governor. He was also a working farmer, and that is where his neighbors found him. The historian John Pomfret writes that Olive settled disputes in and out of court, sometimes in the field with his hands on the plow, and that the habit gave rise to the term Jersey justice. Nobody had to file a suit or wait for a court day. Two people with a quarrel walked out to the furrow, a man whose judgment they all respected heard them out, and they went home settled. Rothbard calls it a "simple, direct, peaceful, rapid, highly efficient, and purely voluntary method of settling disputes" (CiL, p. 389), and he points to the result: in the whole of 1680 there were only two or three court actions in the entire colony. Late in 1681 the Assembly elected Olive its Speaker. A frontier colony with almost no courts, no lawyers and no standing government did not fall into feuds. Its people settled their own quarrels by agreement, and the courts sat nearly idle because nobody needed them.