America’s legal system began collapsing long before today’s partisan battles. In recent years, high-profile failures have shown that our courts are outdated and incompetent.
Every year, dozens of wrongful convictions are overturned after innocent people spend decades behind bars. The National Registry of Exonerations reported scores of new cases in 2024 alone—evidence of systemic flaws in investigations, eyewitness identification, and prosecutions.
Judges themselves are no less fallible. A 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that more than 130 federal judges violated laws by presiding over cases involving companies in which they owned stock. In 2025, Senator Chuck Grassley opened an inquiry into two federal judges who used generative AI to draft incoherent and error-riddled rulings.
Add to that, judges have taken racist stances, lied to officials, and kept defendants in jail without lawyers—then returned to the bench with no accountability, according to a Reuters investigation.
Between 2008 and 2018, Reuters identified 3,600 misconduct cases that states concealed from the public, often hiding the judges’ names. Nine in ten disciplined judges were allowed to resume work. They included a California judge who had sex in his chambers, a New York judge who berated domestic violence victims, and a Maryland judge who returned to work after a drunk driving arrest on the condition he use a Breathalyzer.
At the opposite extreme are judges who flout community outrage. The national uproar over the lenient sentence in the Brock Turner sexual-assault case showed how judicial discretion can provoke disgust and erode public confidence. One juror in the case later told the judge, “Shame on you.”
Public trust in the courts has now fallen to 35 percent, according to Gallup’s 2024 poll. Courts once viewed as pillars of the rule of law have sunk into nihilistic bureaucracy and ideological drift. Judges once respected for scholarship now struggle to understand a world shaped by artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and biotechnology. Meanwhile, the jury system has become an inept relic.
As a lawyer, I have seen firsthand the failures of our courts. As a political activist, I have watched lawmakers legislate their pitiful decline. The judicial system is collapsing under its own traditions. It must be reengineered—from the bench to the jury box.
Many judges today serve not out of a sense of mission but for job security. With average salaries of $150,000 to $250,000—while attorneys earn millions—the bench fails to attract the sound legal minds. To recruit excellence, we must pay accordingly and select judges through a rigorous, merit-based process. Lifetime tenure should give way to renewable terms based on performance, ensuring accountability without compromising independence.
Accountability is the missing cornerstone of American justice. As Professor Barry C. Edwards noted in the Emory Law Journal, appellate courts often uphold flawed rulings due to “affirmation bias.” Being overturned carries no personal consequence for judges. A surgeon who repeatedly harms patients would lose her license; a judge whose rulings are consistently reversed faces no consequences. That absurdity must end. Judicial performance should be measured and reviewed. Judges whose rulings are overturned at abnormally high rates should undergo retraining or face removal or fines.
We must also end the era of the “generalist” judge. The law now intersects rapidly evolving fields such as data science, antitrust economics, biotechnology, and cybersecurity. A judge presiding over financial cases should understand markets; one overseeing criminal trials must grasp forensic science. Judicial academies and continuing education should be mandatory, with evaluations by appellate panels and bar associations ensuring competence in emerging disciplines.
If the judiciary is undertrained and overmatched, the jury system is even worse. It is hopelessly archaic and dangerously unqualified. We would never trust a group of randomly selected citizens to perform brain surgery. Why, then, do we expect them to adjudicate cases involving brain injuries?
The traditional jury was designed for a world of property disputes and livestock theft. Today’s trials involve terabytes of digital evidence, DNA testing, and intricate financial data. Jurors—however earnest—are ill-equipped to comprehend the evidence and too easily swayed by emotion, theatrics, and bias. This is not democracy; it is dysfunction masquerading as civic virtue.
It is time to replace lay juries with professional ones. Trained citizen-jurors—much like certified accountants or analysts—could be drawn from a rotating civil service pool, receive legal education, and be fairly compensated. They would bring consistency, expertise, and rational deliberation to a process now driven by confusion. Abolishing lay juries would require a Constitutional amendment. America has amended its Constitution 27 times before; we can do it again.
Several European democracies have already embraced this model. France and Germany rely on mixed tribunals of professional and lay judges, resulting in more predictable verdicts, shorter trials, and fewer miscarriages of justice. America, by contrast, clings to 18th-century notions of “peers” while our cases increasingly hinge on digital evidence, algorithms, and forensic complexity.
Even with e-filings and virtual hearings, our courts remain mired in ritual and inefficiency—prioritizing ceremony over substance. The Founders built a judiciary suited to their time, grounded in civic participation and Enlightenment ideals. To honor the spirit of the Constitution, we must adapt it to the realities of the modern world. I have argued for this before in my articles in Bloomberg Law and Investors.com, warning that our judiciary is headed towards obsolescence.
The law is the operating system of civilization. Yet the people running it no longer understand the code, and those judging it are ill-equipped to interpret it. Unless we overhaul the system—from judicial recruitment to jury reform—our justice will continue to falter under the weight of anachronistic protocols, unbridled sentiments of third-rate jurists, and incompetence.
It is time to judge the judges—and retire the jury.
Yuri Vanetik is an attorney, political strategist, and Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He served as California Criminal Justice Commissioner and California Lottery Commissioner, appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
