The Ritualism of Jury Trials

I spent the holiday season watching with quiet bemusement as the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, threw a wrench into Britons’ festive plans by announcing that the increasingly embattled Labour government will abolish jury trials in cases that carry a maximum term of imprisonment of three years. In place of juries, these cases will be heard solely by judges.

The announcement led to an immediate political firestorm with Lammy and his party drawing criticism from virtually every corner of British politics. Robert Jenrick of the Tories appealed to tradition and accused Lammy of “rip[ping] up centuries of jury trials.” Lammy faced internal criticism from within Labour as Bradford MP, Imran Hussain, excoriated him for seeking to eradicate “public duty” and eroding “a cornerstone of [British] democracy.” The Liberal Democrats pitched in by valorising jury trials as a “fundamental right” that was being stripped from accused persons.

We should pause momentarily to note that none of Lammy’s critics have offered principled justifications for retaining jury trials. What they have supplied instead are politically resonant formulas designed for rapid media circulation rather than considered reflection.

Perhaps the most detailed criticism of Lammy’s proposal came from the Free Speech Union (“FSU”), which framed it primarily in statistical terms, attacking it as “a direct assault on [Britons’] ancient liberties—and a profound threat to free speech.” The FSU invoked statistics which purported to demonstrate that, in June 2025, magistrates acquitted just 14 per cent of accused persons relying on a free defence, while juries in the Crown Courts did so 33 per cent of the time.

Although such figures are rhetorically powerful, they assume—without substantive argument—that higher acquittal rates are, in themselves, a proxy for justice without controlling for other important variables such as the doctrinal adequacy of invoking the defence, the facts of the individual case, or the quality of evidence adduced. Indeed, as I will subsequently argue, the invocation of acquittal rates conflates the purpose of a trial, that is, the impartial application of facts to law, with the preferred outcomes of various political factions.

Although spirited and undoubtedly earnest, much of the criticism of judge-led trials rests on the uncritical assumption that jury trials are either preconditions of a healthy democratic society, fundamental rights of the accused, or normatively superior to judge-led trials. As I will presently demonstrate, once we move