Two recent sortition advocacy pieces by Simon Threlkeld

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Simon Threlkeld is a former Toronto lawyer (law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School), holds an MA in philosophy (University of Toronto), and writes about democracy. In 1998 he published an article in the academic journal Social Policy titled “A blueprint for democratic law-making: Give citizen juries the final say” whose abstract is below.

17 years later, Threlkeld is still a committed advocate for sortition, and has two recent pieces in the Canadian press advocating the use of sortition in order to democratize the Canadian government and media. In both cases Threlkeld is not proposing to use sortition to select office holders, but rather to use sortition to select committees that would appoint the office holders.

In September Threlkeld proposed in the National Post to have the Canadian Senate members appointed by randomly selected juries:

Simon Threlkeld: Select senators by jury

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Filed under: Academia, Juries, Press, Proposals | 61 Comments »