Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T20:48:16.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Understanding the Short History of Plea Bargaining

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1979

John H. Langbein
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

As late as the eighteenth century, ordinary jury trial at common law was a judge-dominated, lawyer-free procedure conducted so rapidly that plea bargaining was unnecessary. Thereafter, the rise of adversary procedure and the law of evidence injected vast complexity into jury trial and made it unworkable as a routine dispositive procedure. A variety of factors, some quite fortuitous, inclined nineteenthcentury common law procedure to channel the mounting caseload into nontrial plea bargaining procedure rather than to refine its trial procedure as contemporary Continental legal systems were doing.

Type
Historical Perspectives
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Winter 1979 , pp. 261 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Suggestions and references supplied by Albert Alschuler (Colorado), Thomas Green (Michigan), Norval Morris (Chicago), William Nelson (Yale), and Franklin Zimring (Chicago) are gratefully acknowledged.

References

ARNOLD, F. C. VON (1855) “Geständniss statt des Verdicts,” 7 Gerichtssaal (pt. 1) 265.Google Scholar
BALDWIN, Simeon (1908) “The American Practice as to Jury Trials in Criminal Cases,” in Mittermaier, W. and Liepmann, M. (eds.) 1 Schwurgerichte und Schöffengerichte: Beiträge zu ihrer Kenntnis und Beurteilung 315. Heidelberg.Google Scholar
BEATTIE, J. M. (1977) “Crime and the Courts in Surrey: 1736-1753,” in Cockburn, J. S. (ed.) Crime in England, 1550-1800. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
BLACKSTONE, William (1769) 4 Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.10.1093/oseo/instance.00248899CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BUFFALO LAW REVIEW (1974) “Note: The Plea Bargain in Historical Perspective,” 23 Buffalo Law Review 499.Google Scholar
CASPER, Gerhard and Hans, ZEISEL (1972) “Lay Judges in the German Criminal Courts,” 1 Journal of Legal Studies 135.Google Scholar
COCKBURN, James S. (1978) “Trial by the Book? Fact and Theory in the Criminal Process, 1558-1625,” in Baker, J. H. (ed.) Legal Records and the Historian. London: Royal Historical Society.Google Scholar
GOLTDAMMERS, ARCHIV (1870) “Comment: Das Schwurgericht: Geständniss und Verdikt und Kollision zwischen beiden,” 18 Goltdammers Archiv 530.Google Scholar
HALE, Matthew S. (1736) 2 The History of the Pleas of the Crown (S. Emlyn, ed.). London: Nutt.Google Scholar
HAY, Douglas (1975) “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
JACKSON, Richard M. (1972) The Machinery of Justice in England (6th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1973) “The Origins of Public Prosecution at Common Law,” 17 American Journal of Legal History 313.Google Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1974) “Controlling Prosecutorial Discretion in Germany,” 41 University of Chicago Law Review 439.Google Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1977) Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226922614.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1978) “The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” 45 University of Chicago Law Review 263.Google Scholar
MACKINNON, F. D. (1933) “The Law and the Lawyers,” in Turberville, A. S. (ed.) 2 Johnson's England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON CRIME IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (1966) Report. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
RADZINOWICZ, Leon (1948) 1 A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750. London: Stevens & Sons Limited.Google Scholar
SAN FRANCISCO COMMITTEE ON CRIME (1970) A Report on the Criminal Courts of San Francisco, Part I: The Superior Court Backlog—Consequences and Remedies. San Francisco: San Francisco Committee on Crime.Google Scholar
SMITH, Thomas (1583) De Republica Anglorum. London, as Reprinted in Alston, L. (ed.) (1906) De Republica Anglorum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
STEPHEN, James F. (1860) “The Criminal Law and the Detection of Crime,” 2 Cornhill Magazine 697, reproduced in Philip B. Kurland and D. W. M. Waters (1959) “Public Prosecution in England, 1854-79: An Essay in English Legislative History,” [1959] Duke Law Journal 493.Google Scholar
STEPHEN, James F. (1883) 1 A History of the Criminal Law of England. London: Macmillan and Co.Google Scholar
WALTHER, F. (1851) “Ueber die processualische Wirkung des Geständnisses im Schwurgerichtsverfahren,” [1851] Archiv des Criminalrechts (Neue Folge) 225.Google Scholar
WIGMORE, John H. (1908) “A General Survey of the History of the Rules of Evidence,” in A Committee of the Association of American Law Schools (ed.) 2 Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW (1952) “Comment: The District Attorney: A Historical Puzzle,” [1952] Wisconsin Law Review 125.Google Scholar