Research & Policy Analysis

When Lay Certainty Overrides Judicial Doubt: The Structural Failure of Mixed Court Deliberation

Abstract Mixed courts — panels combining professional judges with lay assessors — are a constitutional fixture across Nordic, Germanic, and civil-law jurisdictions. The institutional justification is democratic legitimacy: citizens participate in adjudication as a check on professional insularity. But ethnographic research from Swedish courts, published in late 2024, documents a failure mode that no judicial […]