In Defence of Trial by Jury

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Editor note: This post has been substantially revised following a note from James Kierstead.

The UK government is aiming to reduce the use of trial juries in the UK, claiming this is useful in order to “modernise the criminal courts” and “save victims from pain and anguish of delays”. Under the proposal “cases with a likely sentence of three years or less heard by a Judge alone – estimated to take 20% less time than a jury trial”.

James Kierstead, who has written before about sortition and its history, writing in spiked, makes several good points regarding juries and the attempt to reduce their purview, highlighting the hypocrisy and manipulation behind the government’s claims.

Labour’s attack on jury trials is an attack on democracy

Justice secretary David Lammy’s plans will take yet more power out of ordinary people’s hands.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend In Defence of Trial by Jury, a panel event co-organised by spiked and the Free Speech Union. The event was a response to UK justice secretary David Lammy’s absurd plans to reduce the number of Crown Court cases that go before juries.

The panel members questioned Lammy’s assumption that jury trials were to blame for the Crown Court’s current backlog of almost 78,000 cases (rather than, say, a lack of funding or the number of spurious claims that now make it to court). And they emphasised the centrality of jury trials to our liberal institutions and to the common law, which has long been a bulwark of liberty in Britain, as in other English-speaking countries.

Yet one thing that struck me about the panellists’ excellent contributions is that they all centred on what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called ‘negative’ liberties – our freedom from coercion by the state – rather than on ‘positive’ liberties – our freedom to participate in decision-making with our fellow citizens. In other words, the contributions had more to say about liberalism than about democracy.

The threat to civil liberties posed by Lammy’s jury-trial plans is not to be underestimated. Especially at a time when Brits can be charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ for expressing concern about illegal immigration on social media, as was the position of former Royal Marine Jamie Michael last year. Michael, as it happened, was cleared by a jury of his peers after only 17 minutes. It is understandable to wonder what might have happened had a judge from our current legal elite decided the verdict.
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Filed under: Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Review of Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians in The Guardian

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian makes the predictable points. Substance aside, the very fact that an article in a wide circulation newspaper has the subheading

A Yale professor’s radical proposal to replace elected leaders with ordinary people, chosen by lottery

should be seen as a positive development.

The title of the review prefigures the content:

[C]ould we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump?

Clearly we need to get rid of some politicians, but not all of them.

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

Hinsliff likes the feel good stories about “the human benefits of participation”.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

Giving people actual policy making power in serious matters, is, however, clearly, absurd.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Jakobi: Lottocracy as Democracy

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Lottocracy as Democracy: Political Equality, Representation and Public Control without Elections? is the Ph.D. thesis of Julia Jakobi written in 2024 at the university of Hamburg under the supervision of Christine Straehle and Annabelle Lever. In the introduction Jakobi writes that “[i]n the following I will ask: is lottocracy the better form of democracy?” and “[t]he aim of this thesis is […] to assess the democratic legitimacy of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, independent of additional approval by elected politicians. To do so, I focus on Alexander Guerrero’s (2014; 2020; 2021a; 2021b) utopian proposal of lottocracy.” (Interestingly, this was being done exactly at the time that Guerrero was finally publishing his long promised book on this subject.)

I have not read the thesis carefully from end to end but it seems like it is to a large extent a typical product of the genre of academic work on sortition. It cites the usual sources and covers the usual topics (equality, representation, participation, accountability, deliberation) in the usual manner, ultimately leaving the reader without a clear structure for understanding the issues involved. It is however an accessible work (and much shorter than Guerrero’s book, for example) and can serve as a starting point for those who are interested in and are unfamiliar with the academic work on the subject.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Sortition in 2025

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post. For previous editions look up each year’s December posts.

The most important sortition-related development of the year was undoubtedly the decision by YourParty in the UK to allot the delegates to it founding conference. This decision created an intense discussion around sortition, a discussion that was unprecendented certainly in the UK specifically, probably in the entire Anglosphere, and possibly even in the modern world.

Many activists were horrified to find that sortition stripped them of their standard privilege associated with their established organizing and willingness to invest time and resources. The claims that the whole setup was a way for the organizers to control the process were substantiated by the setup’s details: Thousands of allotted delegates gathered into a hall for a two-day event, inevitably forcing them into the position of passive audience, eliminating any possibility of setting the agenda for the conference. Interestingly, one of the decisions adopted was a rather vague commitment to allotting some of the delegates of future YourParty conferences.

Another notable event was the posting on YouTube and TikTok of a “Subway Take” by the Academy Award winning actor Riz Ahmed in which he proposed to “stop having all elections and elect leaders through a random lottery”. On YouTube the post has now been viewed over 2.5 million times and garnered almost 200,000 likes.

Within the standard academic sortition mud stirring, one proposal stood out: using sortition to create democratic investor assemblies for controlling corporations.

Finally, the electoralist crisis in the West continues to unfold. An opposition candidate who unexpectedly won the first round of presidential elections in Romania was disqualified and the leader of the French Right was barred from participating in upcoming elections after being found guilty of illegal management of party finances.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition, Theory, video | Leave a comment »

Craig Murray was not allotted to the YourParty conference

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Applications, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »

The lottery politics of Britain’s Your Party

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A fairly long article by Michael Chessum in Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières has the title “The lottery politics of Britain’s Your Party: Why sortition undermines socialist organising”. Here are some excerpts.

[Your Party’s] leadership’s embrace of sortition appears less about democratic innovation than maintaining control. Regional assemblies lack voting powers, online suggestions disappear into a black box, and the conference floor will inevitably privilege prominent figures exempt from the lottery system.

This reflects a broader crisis on the British left: rather than building genuine mass politics rooted in branches and workplaces, we’re lurching between quick fixes – whether “hyperleaders” like Mélenchon or procedural shortcuts like sortition. Both bypass the difficult work of developing democratic structures that connect members to strategy and politicise participation from the base upwards.

[Your Party’s] founding conference, set for late November in Liverpool, will be populated by sortition. 13,000 party members will be enfranchised at random, with 6,500 attending on each day. The party membership as a whole will only get a symbolic, “confirmatory” vote on the final draft of the constitution. This constitution could, according to documents released in October, enshrine sortition as the permanent system for conferences.

If we take this plan at face value, the founding leadership of Your Party, with all of its embedded control freakery, is intending to entrust its future to an idealistic, unprecedented process, putting its faith in a literally random assortment of members. More substantive arguments aside (and we’ll come to those), would-be proponents of sortition in Your Party must begin by asking themselves: is that really plausible?

[O]ne would have to be wilfully naive to think that [sortition’s] appearance in Your Party is down to the sudden conversion of senior Corbyn aides to the Athenian democratic ideal.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sortition and rotation, a school of self-organization

Posted on August 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Edmund Griffiths is a long-time advocate for sortition. Griffiths revisits the topic in the context of the new party that is in the process of formation in the UK.

The most immediate topic is the matter of a founding conference. It seems that the plan is to somehow have a procedure of mass voting: “one member one vote, it looks like having an accessible way of engaging which is both in-person and hybrid [online, presumably -YG]”. But of course the final up-or-down vote is a small part of the decision making process.

Griffiths writes:

As in most plebiscitary systems, nearly everything would come down to how the questions were worded and presented; the faceless masses, atomized and unable to suggest amendments, would vote as they were invited to. This hybrid-OMOV system would thus devolve almost all the real decision-making power on the people who hold it now—the new party’s still-invisible leadership. Naturally we don’t know all their names. But it is hardly a secret that at least some of them are (a) independent bigwigs; I would not be astonished to learn that the others include (b) leading members of left groups who have worked with the bigwigs in front organizations; and there could even be a handful of (c) mouthy individuals among them.

[I]n fairness, you could do worse. I am proud to count (a) bigwigs (well, small-time bigwigs), and (b) left group factional operators, and (c) let’s call them people who don’t hate the sound of their own voices, among my friends. But if we want something more representative, something genuinely democratic, there is only one easy and obvious way to get it: just pick the delegates at random out of the entire membership.

Griffiths then fleshes out his proposal a bit:
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Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Democracy and Truth

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Yoram Gat

In a recent article in The Catholic Herald Niall Gooch discusses some objections to sortition from the book Against sortition?. As he describes sortition, “[t]he idea is that involving “normal people” in such deliberation helps to spread power more widely and obtain broader perspectives”.

The contributors to the book set out various reservations about this idea, and various objections. Many of them have procedural concerns – for example, they believe that existing approaches don’t gain a wide enough spectrum of opinion, or that they are easily captured by special interests, or that they don’t really add anything new to a conventional elected legislature.

Others highlight the problems of accountability raised by citizens’ assemblies, or the way in which they dilute the legitimacy of existing bodies. But a few contributors are clearly trying to articulate something like the more fundamental problem identified by John Paul II, which we might sum up with this question: “Does involving lots more people in political decision making actually get you closer to the truth?”

Gooch refers his readers to, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life, a 1995 essay by Pope John Paul II. In it John Paul II writes:

Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a “system” and as such is a means and not an end. Its “moral” value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law to which it, like every other form of human behaviour, must be subject: in other words, its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs. If today we see an almost universal consensus with regard to the value of democracy, this is to be considered a positive “sign of the times”, as the Church’s Magisterium has frequently noted. But the value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes. Of course, values such as the dignity of every human person, respect for inviolable and inalienable human rights, and the adoption of the “common good” as the end and criterion regulating political life are certainly fundamental and not to be ignored.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Religion, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Listen up, ruling elites: It’s not enough to be for the people, you must be with the people

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Clearly, “by the people” is a non-starter, so Nathan Gardels advises those readers of Noema magazine who are members of the benevolent, if a bit misguided, elites that if they wish to stem the rise of the authoritarian strongmen they better be “with” the people.

The rigid polarization that has gripped our societies and eroded trust in each other and in governing institutions feeds the appeal of authoritarian strongmen. Poised as tribunes of the people, they promise to lay down the law (rather than be constrained by it) […]

The embryonic forms of this next step in democratic innovation, such as citizens’ assemblies or virtual platforms for bringing the public together and listening at scale, have so far been mostly advisory to the powers-that-be, with no guarantee that citizen input will have a binding impact on legislation or policy formation. That is beginning to change.

[This takes us] a step closer to government “with” the people instead of just “for” the people […]

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Ballotocracy: A step beyond lottocracy

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Roger Knights

We all know what lottocracy means: Sample Sovereignty. In other words, the elevation of a representative sample of the whole community to legislative seats, replacing elected legislators.

The case for this replacement seems strong:

Per Rousseau, there is less of a “representative” interference between the whole body and the legislators, meaning the General Will is more truly ensconced, and its actions more democratically legitimate.

Democracy means the rule of the considered common sense of the community. But a mass-electoral system gives each voter such a tiny influence on election results that most pay little consideration to political affairs. And an electoral system implies party government, which roils the waters and impairs considered consideration of the issues. And the influence of professional party politicians, pelf (money), propaganda, and the press (more generally, the media) further shapes and restricts the democratic dialogue. This is only a partial list of the demerits of what I call DeMockery (a mockery of democracy). Many others have noted them too.

The public, according to polling, seems disillusioned to an unprecedented level with DeMockery and ready for a change.

And yet there have been no powerful movements toward full lottocracy. Only randomly chosen advisory entities have been created. (And even they have shown flaws, as in Ireland recently.) The public and public intellectuals apparently need a strong inducement to move beyond today’s mass-electoral system.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 17 Comments »

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