Jury-Trial
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 Public Rights Doctrine
The public-rights doctrine is the Seventh Amendment scope limitation that lets Congress channel adjudication of newly-created statutory rights to non-Article-III administrative tribunals without violating the jury-trial guarantee. The doctrine was articulated most fully in Atlas Roofing Co. v. OSHA (1977), and has been substantially narrowed by a doctrinal trajectory running through Granfinanciera (1989), Stern v. Marshall (2011), and SEC v. Jarkesy (2024). The Jarkesy decision held that the SEC's in-house adjudication of civil penalties for securities fraud violates the Seventh Amendment because the underlying claim is analogous to a common-law action for fraud. The doctrinal trajectory is toward greater Seventh Amendment protection in administrative adjudication — one of the few areas of administrative law currently undergoing substantial movement. The doctrine matters for the Adverse Review project because it sits at the Lens III public/private interface and because movement-adjacent literature regularly reads the doctrine as a metaphysical claim about sovereignty ownership of statutory rights rather than as the narrow procedural-scope distinction it actually is.