This is actually the _theory_ of the jury trial, developed by individualistic Anglo-Saxons and some-generations removed Norman French. The j-t is, first of all, an English institution, a creature of the common law, not a continental one.
Your notion that Europeans are a superior form of being is charming chauvinistic. I notice that creationism, anti-abortion attitudes, vicious xenophobia, and extreme right wing politics are running rabid in Poland, a country my ancestors had the foresight to leave two generations before the Poles helped the Nazis murder 95% of Polish Jewry, and where anti-Semitism continues to rage.
[WS:] I assume that the above was meant to be posted to the list.
I did not claim that jury trial was invented by continental thinking. I merely produced an argument in defence of jt that does not rely on the notion of individual common sense or vested interests (as James H argued) but on the notion of the collective or perhaps interaction among individuals (dialectic.) That notion goes well back to the medieval scholasticism, which insisted that every argument is constructed in the form of a dispute between contradicting positions, and the antiquity (Socrates.)
As to your comment re chauvinism -what does it have to do with the price of tea in China? Mob psychology is the same everywhere and produces similar outcomes everywhere - pogroms in Eastern Europe, lynchings in the US, massacres in Europe, Africa, Asia etc. But AFAIK we have not been talking here about mobs and their behavior but about different ways of separating facts from fiction - of which jury trial is an example.
Wojtek