If we didn't already have mandatory jury duty, I don't think there's a hope in hell that you could get a bill passed requiring it today. If you did manage to get a bill passed, I think the courts would almost certainly strike it down.

We have become much less keen on requiring people to work against their will. Jury duty is grandfathered in, but new things of that kind wouldn't be lightly accepted.

This is true of a lot of things. Imagine if libraries didn't exist and someone got the bright idea for one today. It would never fly.

In a world of open source and Wikipedia, that's a bold claim.

Those aren't funded by taxpayers like libraries are.

Maybe if social science was real science instead of quackery people would want to help.

I don't know of anyone that considers jury duty an "annoyance for a cause greater than ourselves". Normal people know intuitively that it is a waste of time, that lawyers, cops, clerks, and judges are just running an extended grift on working people and the rest of society, and that nobody will be harmed by their lying their way out of having to miss work for 7 dollars a day.

Now you do. I just served jury duty this week, in fact, and believe it to be an important (and, yes, annoying) way of serving my country. I find your take disappointingly cynical.

What's the alternative? Professional jurors?

I would say the opposite: shanghai citizens into serving as cops, prosecutors, judges, bailiffs, etc., so that there is some hope that they might influence the process instead of just being another material that the professionals process (like defendants).

In great majority of countries there are no jurors, just judges.