Legal History Commons^™

What Is Remembered, Alice Ristroph

Michigan Law Review

Review of Sarah A. Seo's Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky

Michigan Law Review

Part I of the Article describes the emergence in postwar America of a particular understanding of a democracy, an understanding generally referred to as "democratic pluralism," "analytic pluralism," "pluralist theory," or simply "pluralism." We will spend a fair bit of time unpacking pluralism, because its fine points will prove important when we turn to the task of tracing its reflections in criminal procedure. That task is taken up in Part II, which examines the ways in which the central tenets of democratic pluralism found echoes in criminal procedure - construed broadly to include not only jurisprudence and legal scholarship but …

Pleas' Progress, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

George Fisher's new book, Plea Bargaining's Triumph, is really three books in one. The first part is a careful, detailed explanation of how and why plea bargaining exploded in Middlesex County, Massachusetts in the nineteenth century. This part is the fruit of an impressive amount of original research in Massachusetts court records and newspaper archives. The second part of the book looks more broadly at other academic histories of plea bargaining in England, California, and New York. It explains how the forces that produced plea bargaining in Middlesex County likewise contributed to plea bargaining's rise elsewhere. The final part …

Some Effects Of Identity-Based Social Movements On Constitutional Law In The Twentieth Century, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

What motivated big changes in constitutional law doctrine during the twentieth century? Rarely did important constitutional doctrine or theory change because of formal amendments to the document's text, and rarer still because scholars or judges "discovered" new information about the Constitution's original meaning. Precedent and common law reasoning were the mechanisms by which changes occurred rather than their driving force. My thesis is that most twentieth century changes in the constitutional protection of individual rights were driven by or in response to the great identity-based social movements ("IBSMs") of the twentieth century. Race, sex, and sexual orientation were markers of …

When Constitutional Worlds Colide: Resurrecting The Framers' Bill Of Rights And Criminal Procedure, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been interpreting the Bill of Rights. Imagine Chief Justice John Marshall sitting in the dim, narrow Supreme Court chambers, pondering the interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process in United States v. Burr. Aaron Burr was charged with treason for planning to invade the Louisiana Territory and create a separate government there. To help prepare his defense, Burr wanted to see a letter written by General James Wilkinson to President Jefferson. In ruling on Burr's motion to compel disclosure, Marshall departed from the literal language of the Sixth Amendment - …

The Racial Origins Of Modern Criminal Procedure, Michael J. Klarman

Michigan Law Review

The constitutional law of state criminal procedure was born between the First and Second World Wars. Prior to 1920, the Supreme Court had upset the results of the state criminal justice system in just a handful of cases, all involving race discrimination in jury selection. By 1940, however, the Court had interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate state criminal convictions in a wide variety of settings: mob-dominated trials, violation of the right to counsel, coerced confessions, financially-biased judges, and knowingly perjured testimony by prosecution witnesses. In addition, the Court had broadened its earlier decisions forbidding …

Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

Modem American law is, in a sense, a system of compartments. For understandable curricular reasons, legal education sharply distinguishes the law of evidence from both constitutional law and criminal procedure. In fact, the lines of demarcation between these three subjects extend well beyond law school to the organization of the leading treatises and case headnotes to which practicing lawyers routinely refer in their trade. Many of the most interesting questions in the law, however, do not rest squarely within a single compartment; instead, they concern the content and legitimacy of the lines of demarcation themselves. This article explores a significant, …

Lynching Ethics: Toward A Theory Of Racialized Defenses, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

So much depends upon a rope in Mobile, Alabama. To hang Michael Donald, Henry Hays and James "Tiger" Knowles tied up "a piece of nylon rope about twenty feet long, yellow nylon." They borrowed the rope from Frank Cox, Hays's brother-in-law. Cox "went out in the back" of his mother's "boatshed, or something like that, maybe it was in the lodge." He "got a rope," climbed into the front seat of Hays's Buick Wildcat, and handed it to Knowles sitting in the back seat. So much depends upon a noose. Knowles "made a hangman's noose out of the rope," thirteen …

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, …

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 …

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

Legal History In The High Court--Habeas Corpus, Dallin H. Oaks

Michigan Law Review

Ever since Chief Justice Marshall declared that courts could resort to the common law to determine what Congress meant by the term "habeas corpus" in a federal statute, the history of this venerable remedy has played an important role in the Supreme Court. Over the years, however, courts have moved away from using the writ of habeas corpus for its historic functions of eliciting the cause of commitment and compelling adherence to prescribed procedures in advance of trial until today it has become primarily a means by which one court of general jurisdiction exercises post-conviction review over the judgment of …

Grand Jury Secrecy, Richard M. Calkins

Michigan Law Review

When a leading state such as Illinois enacts "reform" legislation, an impact on the legislatures of other jurisdictions may be anticipated. Accordingly, a need exists for an examination of this legislation in the light of the common-law background of grand jury secrecy and for a further analysis of it in the face of the growing trend toward more liberalized discovery of grand jury minutes in other jurisdictions. It is the contention of the author that such an empirical study will demonstrate that this legislation adopted by Illinois is contrary to all modern judicial thinking and is, in fact, a retrogressive …

The Duty Of Military Defense Counsel To An Accused, Alfred Avins

Michigan Law Review

This article is designed to study the manner in which those Canons of Professional Ethics have been assimilated into the administration of military justice and made the standards for the duty of a military defense counsel.

Constitutional Law - Right To Jury Trial In Indirect Criminal Contempts In Federal Courts, Denis T. Rice S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Should constitutional provisions for jury trial apply to contempts committed outside the physical presence of a federal court? The United States Supreme Court, in the recent case of Green v. United States, reviewed this long disputed question. The case involved two Communist Party leaders who had been convicted of Smith Act violations and then had "jumped bail" when they disappeared in violation of surrender orders requiring their presence in court for sentencing. After four and a half years as fugitives they surrendered in 1956 and were charged with criminal contempt of court. Following a so-called "summary" hearing (without the …

Criminal Procedure On The American Frontier: A Study Of The Statutes And Court Records Of Michigan Territory 1805-1825, William Wirt Blume

Michigan Law Review

The area north and east of Lake Michigan, organized in 1805 as Michigan Territory, was first organized in 1796 as Wayne County of the Northwest Territory. In 1800 the western half of the county, and in 1803 the eastern half, became parts of Indiana Territory, and so remained until July 1805. In 1818 Michigan Territory was expanded westward so as to include all of the area north of Illinois to the Mississippi River.

Constitutional Law-Right To Bail, Robert L. Sandblom S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution provides that "Excessive bail shall not be required . . . ." This clause, as with all of the Bill of Rights, serves as a limitation on the federal government. From a very early date this provision has likewise established a boundary on the discretion of the federal courts in their exercise of criminal jurisdiction. Although this Eighth Amendment provision is a protection against federal encroachment, it does not limit the powers of states, arguments of individual Justices to the contrary notwithstanding.

In the recent Supreme Court decision of Stack v. Boyle, this …

Military Habeas Corpus: I, Seymour W. Wurfel

Michigan Law Review

The mobilization of over twelve million persons into the armed forces in World War II made necessary a vastly expanded resort to court martial proceedings to enforce the criminal law. The trial by military tribunals of civilian employees of the military establishment in overseas areas and of prisoners of war and war crimes defendants added substantially to the number confined by military authority. On January 31, 1950, there remained in federal penal institutions 2508 prisoners serving civilian type felony sentences imposed by military tribunals. Before World War II, legal problems arising from attempts to invoke the remedy of habeas corpus …

Joughin And Morgan: The Legacy Of Sacco And Vanzetti, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of THE LEGACY OF SACCO AND VANZETTI. By G. Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan.

The Place Of Trial Of Criminal Cases: Constitutional Vicinage And Venue, William Wirt Blume

Michigan Law Review

In 1909 one Henry G. Connor, presumably Mr. Justice Connor of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, published in the Pennsylvania Law Review an article entitled "The Constitutional Right to a Trial by a Jury of the Vicinage." The question discussed was: May a state constitutionally provide by statute that a crime be tried in a county other than that in which it was committed? Or, putting the question in terms of vicinage as distinguished from venue, may a state constitutionally provide by statute that a crime be tried by jurors summoned from a county other than the county …

Witnesses-Privilege Against Self-Incrimination-Effect Of Incorrect Decision By Trial Judge In Compelling Answer When Privilege Asserted

Michigan Law Review

ln a judicial proceeding, a question is asked of a witness, which question he declines to answer, claiming that the answer will tend to incriminate him. The judge orders him to answer. He does so and the answer does incriminate him. What happens?

Comment Upon Failure Of Accused To Testify, Robert P. Reeder

Michigan Law Review

Last year the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association adopted resolutions declaring that when the defendant in a criminal trial does not testify the prosecution should be permitted to comment upon that fact. They urged the overthrow of a rule of law which have prevailed in the federal courts ever since accused persons were first permitted to give testimony, over fifty years ago, and which has governed the courts of forty-two out of the forty-eight states. The discussions which preceded the adoption of the resolutions have been published. In them the advocates of the change do not show …

Book Reviews, Edwin W. Patterson, Edson R. Sunderland, C E. Griffin

Michigan Law Review

The title of this brilliant little volume might, more accurately, have been, "The Spirits of the Common Law," for it depicts the common law as the battleground of many conflicting spirits, from which a few relatively permanent ideas and ideals have emerged triumphant. As a whole, the book is a pluralistic-idealistic interpretation of legal history. Idealistic, because Dean Pound finds that the fundamentals of the 'common law have been shaped by ideas and ideals rather than by economic determinism or class struggle; he definitely rejects a purely economic interpretation of legal history, although he demands a sociological one (pp. io-ii). …