The right of the self-consciousness of the party is preserved, in the judicial verdict — according to the side on which it is the subsumption of the qualified case under the law — with respect to the law, through the law being known, and thus the party’s own law; and, with respect to the subsumption, through legal procedure being public. But with respect to the decision on the particular, subjective, and external content of the matter, the cognition of which falls under the first of the sides indicated in § 225, that right finds its satisfaction in trust in the subjectivity of those deciding. This trust is grounded chiefly on the equality of the party with them, according to their particularity, their estate, and the like.

The right of self-consciousness, the moment of subjective freedom, can be regarded as the substantial point of view in the question concerning the necessity of a public administration of justice and of so-called trial by jury. What can be adduced, in the form of utility, for these institutions reduces essentially to this. On other considerations and grounds, of this or that advantage or disadvantage, one may dispute back and forth; these are, like all grounds of reasoning, secondary and not decisive, or else taken from other, perhaps higher, spheres. That the administration of justice could, in itself, be well — perhaps better — carried out by purely juridical courts than with other institutions is not, to this extent, the point at issue; for even if this possibility could be raised to a probability, or even to a necessity, it is, on the other side, always the right of self-consciousness that retains its claims in this matter, and does not find them satisfied. — If knowledge of the law — through the character of what constitutes the laws in their compass, and, further, of the course of judicial proceedings, and the possibility of pursuing one’s right — is the property of a profession that also makes itself exclusive through a terminology that is a foreign language to those whose right is at issue, then the members of civil society who, for their subsistence, are dependent on their own activity, their own knowing and willing, are held alien to, and placed under tutelage with respect to, not only what is most personal and most their own, but also what is substantial and rational within it — the law — and are, in a sense, placed into a kind of serfdom toward such a profession. If they do indeed have the right to be bodily present in court, with their feet (in iudicio stare), this is little, if they are not to be present spiritually, with their own knowledge; and the right that they obtain remains an external fate for them.