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Plea Bargaining and its History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1979

Albert W. Alschuler
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Abstract

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For most of the history of the common law, Anglo-American courts did not encourage guilty pleas but actively discouraged them. Plea bargaining emerged as a significant practice only after the American Civil War, and it generally met with strong disapproval on the part of appellate courts. This practice nevertheless became a dominant method of resolving criminal cases at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and it attracted significant attention and criticism as a result of crime commission studies in the 1920s. In recent years, American criminal courts have become even more dependent on the guilty plea, but the good press that plea bargaining currently enjoys in legal and social science circles is a very recent development. This article explores changes in guilty plea practices and in attitudes toward the guilty plea from the Middle Ages to the present.

Type
Historical Perspectives
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Winter 1979 , pp. 211 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This is a somewhat abbreviated version of an article that will appear in 79 Columbia Law Review (1979), presented here so that my conclusions will appear with those of Lawrence Friedman, John Langbein, Mark Haller, and Lynn Mather. I am grateful to the participants in the Special National Workshop on Plea Bargaining and to Arthur H. Travers, Jr., James E. Scarboro, John H. Langbein, Mark Haller, Roger Lane, and Richard L. Abel for valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.

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