Legal History Commons^™

The Historical Origins Of The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination At Common Law, John H. Langbein

Michigan Law Review

This essay explains that the true origins of the common law privilege are to be found not in the high politics of the English revolutions, but in the rise of adversary criminal procedure at the end of the eighteenth century. The privilege against self-incrimination at common law was the work of defense counsel.

Part I of this essay discusses the several attributes of early modem criminal procedure that combined, until the end of the eighteenth century, to prevent the development of the common law privilege. Part II explains how prior scholarship went astray in locating the common law privilege against …

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

Habeas Corpus: Its History And Its Future, Charles Alan Wright

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Constitutional History of Habeas Corpus by William F. Duker

The Compulsory Process Clause, Peter Westen

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this article traces the history of compulsory process, from its origin in the English transition from an inquisitional to an adversary system of procedure to its eventual adoption in the American Bill of Rights. Part II examines the Supreme Court's seminal decision in Washington v. Texas, which recognized after a century and a half of silence that the compulsory process clause was designed to enable the defendant not only to produce witnesses, but to put them on the stand and have them heard. Part III studies the implications of compulsory process for the defendant's case, from the …

Cohen: The Criminal Process In The People's Republic Of China 1949-1963: An Introduction., And Bodde & Morris: Law In Imperial China: Exemplified By 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases With Historical, Social, And Juridical Commentaries, Victor H. Li

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Criminal Process in the People's Republic of China 1949-1963: An Introduction by Jerome A. Cohen, and Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases with Historical, Social, and Juridical Commentaries by Derke Bodde and Clarence Morris