Originally, the jury was a Saxon counterweight to Norman power. The ancient inhabitants of the British Isles did everything by committee; in fact, the word, “Thing” originally meant the ruling council, a predecessor of Parliament.
The sheriff (shire-reeve) was the “King’s Man” and usually not a local. The jury members were locals, and on the jury specifically for their local knowledge, and ability to judge witnesses accordingly. The sheriff had the power to seize property and persons, but the judgment of the jury was respected to determine guilt and settle disputes.
Nowadays, people are thrown off juries if they know any of the parties in court, in order to avoid malicious judgments. In part, this is inevitable, because the size of communities is so often so much larger than in olden days. It would be very difficult to get a jury with the local wisdom to judge using experience with the parties. On the other hand, anonymity means that all the work of informing the jury falls on the disputing lawyers, which often devolves into mere games-playing.
So, have we outgrown the jury system? Probably, but without a trustworthy alternative, nobody wants to say so.
Thank you and interesting history on how jurys once operated. So why couldn’t we have committees, thus the attorneys would be out of the process? Of course we’d run into the same thing the Supreme court does in their appointments but it would likely be better than attorney’s determining the jurors.
The jury of peers, as well as the concept of innocent before being proven guilty, and some other key concepts goes back even further, to the Germanic tribes and disputes between warriors.
The Germanic tribes had many parallels to Native American tribes, both of whom had chiefs with no particular authority other than the number and loyalty of their followers. If they felt like following, they did, for as long as they saw fit.
To avoid duels to decide disputes, and resultant familial blood feuds, a chief would intervene, but because he would not know particular circumstances of an argument, a panel of warriors would reach a consensus as to which side of the dispute should prevail. Then the authority of the chief would determine compensation.
This contrasted markedly with Roman law, yet in the migration to Britain became the basis of Common law. For its part, Roman law remained behind, and was eventually reconstructed in Napoleonic law, then finally the Code Civil that exists today.
The EU is utterly dominated by the Code Civil, which permeates middle European culture. But it runs headlong into Common law and the evolved Nordic Viking law, whose cultures are equally permeated with their own principles. And despite the willingness of the British and Norse governments to try and rewrite their culture, things like the Magna Carta cannot be easily dispensed with by the gray men in Brussels and their accomplices.