By: Carter McCharter

Carter McCharter
Fri, 05 Dec 2025 02:59:12 +0000

There’s a small debate here in the US over mandatory jury service (slavery in violation of the 13th Amendment) and low pay (below the government-mandated minimum labor laws), and one of the primary objections to hiring jurors in a free market is the “enormous” expense.

This really annoys me. I don’t know how it is in the UK, but the US federal and state governments control how many courts and judges there are, how many law students and thus lawyers there are, how many laws there are, and how many people are prosecuted. These are all directly under the control of the various governments. These are not the result of some natural calamity like hurricanes. I suspect the same is probably generally true in the UK too.

If the governments really are concerned about the backlog, they are in control and they can fix the problem simply by not writing as many petty laws and not prosecuting people for mean tweets.

The very fact that governments want to abolish jury trials is the primary reason to keep them.