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One of the Anglo things that is commonly criticized in continental Europe is the judicial system. The complaint is usually formulated as "I wouldn't want to delegate the question of guilt to twelve randos that have no understanding of the law". My usual rebuke used to be "if the prosecutor can't explain to random person what the defendant did wrong, what good is this law he's allegedly broken?"
But recently I understood that the benefit of the jury system goes deeper. Most people (citation needed) want to be law-abiding, upstanding citizens. Let's say the laws are so complex that only a judge with a law degree can determine whether someone has broken the law or not. How then can anyone else be sure they are a law-abiding citizen? We want that IQ 85 guy in an ill-fitting rented suit to know deep inside if he's guilty or not. If the law is an overwrought monstrosity that overwhelms the jury, their reasonable doubt about the circumstances of the case is the intended outcome. Laws that govern everyone must be clear to everyone.
The counterpoint is that this principle only works in a culture which values the rule of law, which is increasingly not the case. If it becomes difficult to find 12 random people who will be willing to make a decision based solely on the law and the relevant facts of the case, then the justice system itself becomes unviable.
If you live in a society that doesn't value law to such an extreme, I don't think your issue is with the jury system anymore to begin with and instead just with greater society. Like as a metaphor, if you're hooking up your brand new hose to a sewage pipe, the sewage water that comes out isn't the fault of the hose. The jury/hose itself is fine, it represents the views/water of general society/the water supply.
I think the idea is you shouldn't at all recommend the use of hoses for water supply if all you have is sewage. It's a bit paternalist, but you can say you should have the elites interpret the laws until the general public reaches their level.
I understand why, say, reactionaries would endorse that. But in America, complaints about the rule of law are strongly correlated with “silent majority” populism. Lawlessness is allegedly fueled by elites, even if it’s perpetrated by an underclass.
That has something to do with the outpouring of Mamdani hate. He’s a singular figure, which makes him one of the enablers of lawlessness.
I think there is a strain of populist thought, which I don't think is completely wrong, that technocratic liberalism as-implemented has so overweighted seemingly sympathetic cases as to be obviously, if indirectly, negative to the majority. "Harm reduction" sounds like a nice idea, but in practice means giving addicts clean needles to use and leave on playgrounds, and while it might reduce acute harm to addicts is not reducing harm to playing kids: the diffuse cost was ignored or swept aside. Asylum laws sound nice and probably do help the people claiming it, but the state seems to assume the side effects on the rest of us are negligible: if you believe that I have an election to sell you. Ditto for soft-on-crime policies and police abolition. Across the board bureaucrats seem to have a clear blind spot for the diffuse side effects of policies on the rest of us outside of a few groups that get special hyper-focus on disparate impacts and treatments.
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Justice still has to be rendered. Even among totally disloyal subjects. Or you lose your claim to sovereignty to the first entity that starts rendering it.
Colonial powers don't tend to have jury trials, but they do have courts.
A personal sense of "justice" imposed on a society that disagrees with your notion is just tyranny. The jury draws from the beliefs and thoughts of the general public in the same way that the hose draws from the water supply. The population itself gets to decide morality and edge cases.
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