Why axe so many juries? My plan would solve the courts crisis without harming justice | Alan Moses

2026-03-23 - 11:19

The backlog in England and Wales is serious but there are other ways to address it. There are many retired judges and calling them into action could be key Hyperbolic cliches fly back and forth in the debate about the abolition of jury trials. The dispute will never be resolved and it distracts from the problem facing us today: how to reduce the current disastrous backlog of cases? The controversy is not new. If you are in favour, you recite Lord Devlin in 1956: trial by jury is “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. If you are against, you quote GK Chesterton: “Our civilisation has ... very justly decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be entrusted to trained men” – cited by Prof Glanville Williams in his challenge to the superstitious reverence for juries in 1963’s The Proof of Guilt. Alan Moses is a former lord justice of appeal, a court of appeal judge and the former chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) Continue reading...