Unnamed Justice of the Peace 5

The second "Justice of the Peace" who appears in "Barn Burning" also holds court in a general store (17). He too is a "man in spectacles" (17). In the civil case he presides over, brought by Ab Snopes against Major de Spain, he decides how much Ab must pay for ruining Mrs. de Spain's rug. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one. While there is no reason to assume Faulkner's imaginative conception of the office is faithful to reality at any or every point in the history of the state's justice system, at present in Mississippi there are 197 Justices who serve in 82 local justice courts, which have jurisdiction over some misdemeanors and other minor criminal and civil cases. In Faulkner's fictions there are 11 unnamed "justices of the peace." It's possible that Faulkner imagined two or more of them as a recurring character, but since the texts provide no textual evidence of that, we create separate entries for each of them.)