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Understanding the Short History of Plea Bargaining

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

John H. Langbein
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Abstract

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.

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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.

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