With a POD any time before the first jury trial in history, make it so that the concept of juries is never thought of in any country.
AHC: make juries unheard of
- Thread starter Quintuplicate
- Start date
SwampTiger
Banned
Probably not possible. Many indigenous groups had some form of council to advise leaders or decide themselves on criminal conduct and penalties. Even today, various powerful central leaders ask advice to legitimize serious decisions.
Isaac Beach
Banned
Juries of sort have existed in some form since the ancient Greeks. In theory it’s not difficult to avoid this: have a more arbitrary political system emerge, where democracy doesn’t exist, than the city states. But then you’re changing literally all of Western history, so I don’t know how helpful that is.
Preventing any country from ever thinking of juries is probably impossible, though preventing them from becoming widespread in the modern world could be doable.
I think the best way would probably be to avoid the development of a process of formalized trials, with the application or the law being instead delegated to bureaucrats. Some of these bureaucrats would take the role of "judge" and would oversee a trial-equivalent process.
A bureaucracy-centered legal system could easily lead to abuses of power especially when bureaucrats become corrupt or a strong government breaks the rule of law. Juries may have originally arisen to prevent such abuses of power, so would need some alternate mechanism to do this. Maybe appeal to religious courts or some other legal body which is independent of the bureaucracy? Not sure, just spitballing here.
A bureaucracy-centered legal system could easily lead to abuses of power especially when bureaucrats become corrupt or a strong government breaks the rule of law. Juries may have originally arisen to prevent such abuses of power, so would need some alternate mechanism to do this. Maybe appeal to religious courts or some other legal body which is independent of the bureaucracy? Not sure, just spitballing here.
The concept of several disinterested people deciding or advising on a case is pretty hard to shake. You'd be better off specifying a country or timeframe.
Well since juries are pretty foundational to concepts like impartial justice and the rule of law, you would have to get rid of those, which essentially means butterflying away the entire Western legal tradition. Maybe if you abort the establishment of the Roman Republic you could delay juries as a concept, though I'll admit I don't know how much of a role Greek or Celtic institutions played in the development of juries in antiquity, so that POD on its own may not be enough
That is not true, you can, and do and did have courts that function as well or better that juries systems. As system of Lay judges has shown itself to function much, much, better than juries.
To answer the op, the simplest way is for the roman republic to adopt a lay judge system instead of juries.