Conceivably, you could run trials by having a judge (or panel of judges) bring forth the evidence they thought was important. Instead, many countries have a system where one party prevents "one side" of a case and another party presents the "other side". How did this come about?
Thanks, using this terminology, I guess I'm wondering about why different places settled on "inquisitorial" systems vs (whatever the opposite of inquisitorial is)-systems. Naive, it seems like an inquisitorial system would be the obvious way to do it. I'm sure that places with non-inquisitorial systems had reasons for choosing that, but I'm not sure why or what the tradeoffs are.