Englishkangaroo court
Meaning: A court set up outside the regular legal system; staged trial where the outcome is set from the beginning.
Example: “The players complained that the disciplinary hearing was a kangaroo court.”
Origin: American despite the distinctly Australian-sounding name, first documented in the Mississippian newspaper in 1839. Two competing stories are commonly offered for the choice of "kangaroo," and neither is well confirmed. One ties it to Gold Rush-era claim jumpers, miners who illegally seized land already claimed by others and were then hauled before hasty, informal mock trials — the kangaroo supposedly evoking the jumping involved in claim-jumping itself. A second and more often repeated theory instead points to frontier judges who "hopped" from town to town dispensing quick, often arbitrary rulings with little concern for fairness or due process. Multiple sources note that the claim-jumping story in particular has the feel of an invented, after-the-fact explanation rather than a documented fact, and the phrase's real origin is genuinely uncertain.
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