If you're a peasant, your peers would be the other peasants. If you're an aristocrat, your peers would also be. IMO it doesn't make sense to have random laypers

If you're a peasant, your peers would be the other peasants. If you're an aristocrat, your peers would also be. IMO it doesn't make sense to have random laypersons decide highly technical cases over what are many times pedantic disputes. They won't understand and they don't care, but they're in charge of deciding, and their decisions can have widespread repercussions. I agree that having a jury of 10 random software developers deciding Oracle vs Google would more than a little biased (APIs being copyrightable), but I think that it would largely be a good thing -- professionals who actually know about this stuff would be making the decisions. Luckily for everyone, they were able to dumb it down enough for the jury to understand, but not all cases are so lucky. I just chose this example because many people on here are likely to remember this case, even though it doesn't really illustrate my point that random citizens deciding technical cases is IMO not the best solution.