Sixth-Amendment
If every defendant demanded a jury trial, the criminal system would collapse
The Sixth Amendment guarantees a jury trial; the modern American criminal system depends on near-universal non-exercise of that right. The Supreme Court has effectively conceded the dependence: Justice Kennedy in Lafler v. Cooper (2012) — 'criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials,' with 97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions by guilty plea (the Court's own figure). The system maintains the plea-dominant equilibrium through structural pressures it itself engineers (the USSG § 3E1.1 acceptance-of-responsibility discount; pretrial detention; charge-stacking). The capacity arithmetic confirms the structural conclusion: a modest plea-rate drop multiplies trial demand against essentially fixed infrastructure with a 70-day Speedy Trial Act constraint that elasticity cannot fully absorb. The form/function asymmetry the project documents under substance-over-form has its most operationally consequential expression here.
The Accuser's Vanishing Risk
Every legal tradition Anglo-American law descends from imposed personal risk on the actors who generated adjudicatory outputs — the accuser, the witness, the judge. The procedural revolution that began under Innocent III in the early thirteenth century and reached its operational apex in the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) progressively dismantled that accountability scheme. The modern American immunity stack — Imbler (1976), Stump (1978), Harlow (1982) — formalizes the dismantling through judicial construction of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The essay traces the genealogy and asks what the Sixth Amendment's accusatorial design was meant to protect against.