The Netherlands might not be doing as well as you might think.
Things like the Chipshol debacle in the Netherlands shows that there is strong evidence of judicial collusion in a series of court cases - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipshol has a very superficial summary of something that I found quite shocking, involving public accusations of corruption, perjury, where one of the ex-judges involved was forced out as head of the Dutch anti-trust authority when it all blew open.
Judges and lawyers seem to come from the same social circles, have gone to the same universities, members of the same clubs and so on. To access the conveyor-belt of promotions and opportunities, it is not inconceivable that a culture of "scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours" in a part of a small legal and judicial community in a small country could form.
A system in which lay-people are involved may have to work a lot harder to pretend that biased judgements are fair.
Things like the Chipshol debacle in the Netherlands shows that there is strong evidence of judicial collusion in a series of court cases - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipshol has a very superficial summary of something that I found quite shocking, involving public accusations of corruption, perjury, where one of the ex-judges involved was forced out as head of the Dutch anti-trust authority when it all blew open.
Judges and lawyers seem to come from the same social circles, have gone to the same universities, members of the same clubs and so on. To access the conveyor-belt of promotions and opportunities, it is not inconceivable that a culture of "scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours" in a part of a small legal and judicial community in a small country could form.
A system in which lay-people are involved may have to work a lot harder to pretend that biased judgements are fair.