Justice of the Peace Court

Reading notes

• The Head Gardener's Story §16 there exists in the world no man who could have killed our doctor, ... evidently there is no murder here

  SENSITIVITY / CONTENT NOTE. The judges' first ruling is a fabricated 'no crime occurred' finding, reached not from the physical evidence (which they themselves list as consistent with murder) but from an a priori conviction that no one in their town could be capable of the act. This is the fable's first and, in its way, most disturbing act of institutional bad faith: an official verdict that plainly falsifies an unnatural death as an accident. It is presented within the fable without any narratorial signal that it is anything but sincerely meant -- the judges believe their own reasoning -- and the story leaves it to the reader to judge whether this first ruling is being held up as touching naivete or as a warning about what 'faith in man' can license a legal system to do to the truth.

• Sergeant Prishibeyev §4 Mister Magistrate

  The Justice of the Peace (mirovoy sudya) was the elected local magistrate's court created by the 1864 judicial reform to try minor civil and criminal matters quickly and cheaply. Prishibeyev's whole case turns on his refusal to accept that its jurisdiction is deliberately limited -- he wants the drowned body treated as a matter for the district investigator and 'the judges,' not settled locally.

• Sergeant Prishibeyev §9 Cases like this,' he says, `aren't within the Justice of the Peace's jurisdiction

  Zhigin is stating simple legal fact -- the 1864 reform gave Justices of the Peace jurisdiction only over petty offenses, not suspected homicides, which properly went to the district investigator (sudebny sledovatel) and the circuit court. Prishibeyev hears this correct statement of law as an outrage against 'the authorities' and beats Zhigin for it, which is the story's central irony.