By any modern measure, criminal justice is expensive. Court buildings crumble, legal aid budgets shrink, and politicians warn that “we can’t try every case before a jury” if we want to tackle backlogs. At the same time, governments sign off on defence programmes worth billions, deploy troops abroad, and expand security services with little of the same public hand-wringing about cost.

The contrast poses a blunt question: if the state can afford, in our name, to take life or project lethal force overseas, how can it plead poverty when asked to fund the slow, careful business of public justice at home?

Behind that question lies a deeper one. Jury trial is being quietly recast as an optional luxury—a Victorian ornament that can be trimmed for efficiency. Yet in the common-law tradition, the jury was never meant to be a decorative flourish. It was designed as a structural check on government power, a device that embeds ordinary citizens inside the most coercive machinery of the state.

Once we understand that, the argument that juries are too slow or too costly begins to look less like administrative tidying and more like constitutional surgery.

A centuries-old answer to a timeless problem

The core problem jury trial was built to address is as old as government itself: who gets to decide when the state can take your liberty—or, historically, your life?

In medieval England, when kings first began to consolidate justice under the Crown, serious cases could be settled by ordeal or by combat. Guilt might be tested by plunging a hand into boiling water or by surviving a duel. These rituals were brutal and theologically driven, but they had one feature modern systems envy: people believed them to be beyond human manipulation.

When the Church finally withdrew its support for ordeals in the early 13th century, England faced a crisis. If God was no longer to decide, someone else would have to. The solution that emerged was radical in its simplicity: instead of trusting violence or divine signs, trust a group of local people under oath.

From that point, the idea of “lawful judgment of his peers”—later wrapped in the mythology of Magna Carta—gradually took on legal substance. Over centuries, the system evolved from panels of local notables who already knew the facts to the familiar modern pattern: a judge overseeing procedure and law; a randomly selected jury weighing the evidence and deciding the facts.

It was not an exercise in nostalgia. It was a recognition that no single official, however learned, should hold the combined power to interpret the law, control the process, and decide guilt.

Juries as “little parliaments”

By the 17th century, the jury had become more than an evidential device. It was a constitutional actor.

When jurors in London refused to convict two Quakers—William Penn and William Mead—despite heavy pressure from the bench, and were punished for it, a higher court eventually ruled that jurors could not be fined or jailed for their verdicts. In effect, the ruling confirmed that juries answer to the law and their consciences, not to judges.

From that point, the jury was understood as an independent body in its own right. In political and religious trials, lay panels sometimes refused to enforce harsh or unpopular laws. In the American colonies, juries famously balked at prosecutions for seditious libel, helping to carve out a space for a free press long before modern rights declarations.

Observers began to describe juries as “little parliaments”: temporary assemblies of citizens entrusted with state power, listening to arguments, weighing evidence, and deciding on a binding outcome. For Alexis de Tocqueville, they were one of the most effective ways in which the people themselves participated in governing. For revolutionaries in America, the removal of jury trial in revenue and trade cases was a grievance grave enough to list among the reasons for independence.

In that context, to take juries away was not merely to streamline procedure. It was to remove one of the very organs through which the people exercised sovereignty over the state.

The modern temptation: efficiency first, principle later

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and the jury stands in a far less romantic light.

Criminal justice systems in Britain, the United States and other common-law countries are clogged. Trials are delayed. Legal aid is strained. Governments have discovered that plea bargaining and administrative shortcuts clear dockets far more quickly than full trials ever could. Against this backdrop, proposals surface again and again:

• judge-only trials for complex fraud;

• judge-only trials for certain sexual offences;

• limits on jury trials for “lesser” offences to save time and money;

• wider use of specialist tribunals with no lay participation.

Supporters insist that these ideas are pragmatic, not ideological. Juries, they argue, are not being abolished; they are simply being reserved for the most serious cases. Besides, they say, other democracies do perfectly well without Anglo-American style juries. Continental Europe, with its professional judges and mixed tribunals, is often held up as a model.

There are truths in those points. It is correct that many stable democracies rely primarily on professional judges, sometimes sitting with lay assessors rather than separate juries. It is also true that not every minor regulatory offence can or should be decided by twelve citizens in a wood-panelled courtroom.

But when politicians in a jury-based system reach for cost and convenience as the main reasons to limit lay trial, something crucial is being elided. The question is not whether any civilised system can function without classic juries—history shows that some can. The question is whether we can strip lay citizens out of our own constitutional design without hollowing out a central safeguard it was built around.

Justice is not a discretionary spend

“Justice is expensive,” runs the familiar refrain. It is. So is everything the modern state does at scale.

The same governments that warn of the cost of summoning jurors, funding defence counsel and maintaining court buildings sign off on fighter jets, nuclear deterrents, long-range missiles and expanding security services. They invest in surveillance systems and technologies capable of tracking citizens in ways medieval rulers could never have imagined.

This is not an argument against defence or security spending. It is an argument about priorities and honesty.

If the state claims the power to deprive people of liberty, and in some jurisdictions to take life through the death penalty or by sending citizens into combat, then funding a robust, publicly legitimised system for deciding guilt is not a favour. It is a non-negotiable cost of doing government at all.

To put it in the stark terms many ordinary people instinctively grasp: if we can spend money to kill people, we can spend money to offer justice.

That does not mean every case must reach a jury. But it does mean that “we’re short of cash” is not a morally adequate reason to downgrade or dismantle the parts of the system that embody public control over state punishment.

Critics often say that modern juries are anachronistic. Law is complex. Forensic science, financial crime and digital evidence can be labyrinthine. Wouldn’t trained judges, perhaps aided by expert assessors, simply do a better job?

The empirical record is more modest than the caricature suggests. Studies in several jurisdictions have found that judges and juries agree on verdicts in the majority of cases; when they differ, it is not obvious that one side is consistently “better” than the other. In many trials, both are grappling with the same problems: ambiguous evidence, human memory, conflicting expert opinions.

More importantly, accuracy is not the only value at stake.

Modern states are dense with experts, from economists to epidemiologists to intelligence analysts. In area after area, decisions with enormous human consequences are taken by specialists—often behind closed doors, with limited public input. We accept some of this because the questions are genuinely technical. But criminal verdicts sit at a different moral register. They are not about setting interest rates or modelling a virus. They are about whether the state may, in the name of the people, cage one of those people.

In such cases, it is not obviously illegitimate—indeed, it may be essential—that non-experts have the last word on the facts. The law, guided by judges and parliaments, defines offences and procedures. Experts contribute evidence and context. But the final communal judgment—did the prosecution, with all its power and resources, actually prove what it said it would prove?—is entrusted to citizens.

That allocation of authority sends a message: you are not merely subjects of law; you are participants in its most serious decisions.

The jury as a brake on overreach

There is another function juries perform, which makes governments understandably uncomfortable. They can refuse.

Sometimes this refusal is ugly. History offers examples of racist or politicised acquittals where juries failed victims and reinforced injustice. No one should romanticise that record.

But there is a different, equally real tradition in which lay panels act as a brake on overreach:

• by declining to convict under laws that criminalise dissent or honest journalism;

• by softening the impact of rigid statutes where the letter of the law and basic fairness diverge;

• by slowing down the machinery of the state long enough to force it to make its case in public.

Professional judges, constrained by career incentives and appellate oversight, are less free to exercise that kind of rough moral judgment. Some see that as a virtue. Others, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, see it as precisely why citizens must remain in the room.

If juries are marginalised, the last institution that can stand in the way of a determined prosecutor armed with an expansive statute book becomes weaker. In systems already prone to heavy plea bargaining, where the vast majority of cases never reach trial, reducing the role of juries further risks turning criminal justice into a series of negotiations conducted in the shadow of penalties that no one has tested in open court.

“Other countries manage without juries” – but that is not the whole story

It is true that many democracies do not share the Anglo-American jury tradition. Germany, for example, relies on mixed tribunals where lay judges sit alongside professionals. Much of continental Europe entrusts serious cases to career judges subject to rigorous training and strong formal guarantees of independence.

These systems developed under different legal cultures, with different safeguards. They are not simply the same model minus juries. Oversight structures, appeal mechanisms and the social status of judges all work together to maintain a degree of legitimacy.

In countries like Britain and the United States, however, the constitutional story is different. Here, the presence of the jury has been one of the main historical arguments for allowing the state to wield broad criminal powers in the first place. Legislatures passed severe laws in the belief that jurors, drawn from the community, would temper them where conscience demanded. Courts accepted strong police powers because, ultimately, lay citizens could say no.

Dismantling or significantly shrinking the jury in such a system, without simultaneously strengthening other forms of democratic control and transparency, is not a neutral “modernisation”. It is a rebalancing of power toward the executive and the judiciary at the expense of the public.

The quiet erosion

The danger today is less an overnight abolition than a quiet erosion.

A cap here on which offences qualify. A pilot there for judge-only trials “in the most complex cases”. Procedural reforms that increase pressure on defendants to plead rather than insist on a jury, under threat of far harsher sentences if they do not. Cuts to legal aid that make it harder to mount a robust defence. Each individual measure can be justified, at least superficially, on grounds of efficiency or practicality.

Taken together, they amount to something more serious: fewer citizens sitting in judgment, fewer prosecutions exposed to full public scrutiny, fewer moments when ordinary people are forced to look the power of the state in the eye and say “proved” or “not proved”.

In an age of algorithmic risk scores, predictive policing and expanding national-security laws, that trend should give us pause. If technological and bureaucratic systems increasingly decide whom to target, and professional actors increasingly decide how to punish, the space for ordinary moral judgment narrows.

A moral line we should be unwilling to cross

The case for preserving robust jury trial, then, is not simply nostalgic or procedural. It is moral.

A political community that claims the right to incarcerate, and at times to kill, owes its members more than efficient paperwork and expert opinion. It owes them a structure in which the people themselves share responsibility for the gravest decisions the state makes in their name.

That is what a jury embodies. It is messy, sometimes maddening, and rarely cheap. It requires time off work, travel expenses, lost productivity and patient explanation. It produces verdicts that governments and commentators occasionally dislike. It forces us to live with the fact that justice, administered by human beings, can never be entirely tidy.

But that is the point. The alternative is not a perfectly neutral machine. It is greater concentration of power in the hands of officials, however well-intentioned.

We can debate how widely jury trial should extend. We can redesign processes to support jurors better. We can learn from other systems that blend professional expertise with lay oversight in different ways. What we cannot honestly do is treat juries as a line item to be trimmed when budgets are tight, while other, more coercive arms of the state expand unchecked.

If we are willing to finance the means to wage war, to arm police, to build prisons and detention centres, then we can—and must—finance the institutional channels that allow ordinary citizens to stand between the individual and the state and say, with authority, “You have not proved your case”.

In that sense, the jury remains what it has been for centuries: the last line of defence against government overreach. Once we let it fade into a historical curiosity, getting it back will be far harder than keeping it alive.