Comment by lisa_henderson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisa_henderson | Hacker News Reader

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About this:

"Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform."

How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system:

http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe

While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice.

The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system.

A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.

The bigger issue is that these things are hard to test and noone is willing to run the tests. In theory the US has a good setup for a state to decide to do some testing but politics make it impossible (and there's a decent ethical argument for either side that is far from simple). I mean think about the reactions if some politician would say "we need to see if our courts are as good as they can be, I propose we get rid of the jury system and replace it with X to see if X is superior"

1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be.

2) Lol crackpot.

3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time.

4) Lol crackpot.

Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship. I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.

The purpose of a jury isn't necessarily to make the best, most legally correct decision. The purpose of a jury is to put the people in control of the state.

One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.

Yeah, I can't say that. I'm not sure Schöffe is a silver bullet solution but that a jury is "the best we've got" is unlikely. Valid point.

Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time. In all the common law countries you list, this is basically unheard of, at least in the last 400 years.

Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.

Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder. The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries. That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.

> Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time.

Some civil law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years. Some common law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years (e.g.: English revolution, detainment of Americans with Japenese ancestry during World War 2).

> Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.

Except when it doesn’t serve the common interests very well by, for example, maintaining the legality of slavery well past the point it was abolished in many (civil and common law) countries and by taking another 100 years to reconsider the whole apartheid thing. In comparison, the civil law countries in Scandinavia seem to have faired quite well on the civil rights front and it was also civil, not common, law countries that drove the spearhead for women’s suffrage.

> Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder.

Ah, yes, the famous French common law system based not at all on the Code Napoleon and the equally famous Soviet common law system.

> The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries.

Again, the English revolution comes to mind. Or that whole debacle where slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war in the 1860s! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland weren’t exactly hotspots of instability either. And to be honest, I am not sure that Quebec has seen many more fascist dictators than the rest of Canada, something that would be implied by its civil law nature?

> That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.

Except, of course, when you can.

Well we'll see how long Europe can go before it completely burns itself down. I think we are up to almost 70 years (the record is what, 99 years?).

The main idea behind the jury system is to provide a further check upon the power of government. Unless there is a system which does a better job of that, then, from the point of view of liberal government, there is no point in reviewing it.

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