1st Edition

Theoretical Foundations of Criminal Trial Procedure

By Paul Roberts Copyright 2014
    642 Pages
    by Routledge

    The nineteen articles and essays reproduced in this volume explore the theoretical foundations of criminal trial procedure. Key concepts, and their theoretical and practical significance, are elucidated in a substantial new introduction, setting out the methodological building blocks of criminal procedure scholarship. Central to this enterprise is an effort to rethink traditional common law conceptions of the Law of Evidence. The volume is divided into four parts, addressing disciplinary parameters, normative underpinnings, legal epistemology, and institutional jurisprudence, to create an innovative intellectual framework for theorising criminal trial procedure. It showcases classic writings on criminal procedure law and adjudication alongside the best of recent theoretically-informed procedural scholarship, thereby placing the criminal trial in its broader political, social and institutional contexts. This collection both encapsulates and develops a jurisprudence of criminal trial procedure, conceived as applied political morality, with robust epistemological foundations and attuned to the contemporary challenges of cosmopolitan law.

    Contents: Introduction. Part I Questions, Concepts, Methods: The present and future of the law of evidence, James B. Thayer; The future of constitutional criminal procedure, Akhil Reed Amar; Evidence as a multi-disciplinary subject, William Twining; Analyzing the trial: interdisciplinary methods, Robert Burns, Marianne Constable, Justin Richland and Winnifred Sullivan; Introduction: theorising the criminal trial, Antony Duff, Lindsay Farmer, Sandra Marshall and Victor Tadros. Part II Normative Underpinnings in Political Morality: Truth in adjudication, Mirjan Damaška; Theorising procedural tradition: subjects, objects and values in criminal adjudication, Paul Roberts; Liberalism and the criminal trial, Ho Hock Lai; The courage of our convictions, Sherman J. Clark; Realizing justice: the development of fair trial rights in China, Jennifer Smith and Michael Gompers. Part III Legal Epistemology: Epistemology legalized: or, truth, justice, and the American way, Susan Haack; Probability - the logic of the law, Bernard Robertson and G.A. Vignaux; The problematic value of mathematical models of evidence, Ronald J. Allen and Michael S. Pardo; The O.J. Simpson stories: behavioral scientists’ reflections on The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, Reid Hastie and Nancy Pennington. Part IV Institutional Jurisprudence: The forms and limits of adjudication, Lon L. Fuller; Legal processes and national culture, Oscar G. Chase; Some realism (and idealism) about the trial, Robert P. Burns; Prosecuting and defending rape: perspectives from the bar, Jennifer Temkin; Unpacking show trials: situating the trial of Saddam Hussein, Jeremy Peterson. Name index.

    Biography

    Paul Roberts is Professor of Criminal Jurisprudence at the University of Nottingham, UK. Paul has been visiting professor or invited lecturer at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), the University of Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the University of Gottingen, the University of New South Wales (UMSW), Sydney, and the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg), RSA. He is editorial board member of four academic journals: International Commentary on Evidence (ICE); Criminal Law & Philosophy; Law, Probability and Risk and Law and Philosophy. He was also a founding editorial board member of The International Journal of Evidence and Proof (E & P), serving as Reviews Editor (1995-2005) and General Editor (2005-9).