In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 9:06 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law by job
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

If the idea is to protect against dysfunctional judges, I'm pretty sure there are better ways.

That's one of the purposes. Another purpose is to ensure that legislators and judges cannot drift too far away from the average man -- and if anything the US habit of throwing off juries anyone who has detectable skills helps here, odious though it is. It's as if they're de-eliting the jury pool. (Not that the US system of jury selection doesn't have other huge problems -- jurisdiction shopping, groundless but nonetheless useful appeals to local pride...)

I also note that people have been looking for a better system than juries (in an ad-hoc intermittent fashion) for most of a millennium, and nothing obviously better has emerged. Everything else anyone has tried is prone to capture by one or another interest group or power bloc.

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