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Judges, Juries, and the History of Criminal Appeals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2011

Benjamin L. Berger
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Extract

The three articles offered in this forum on the early history of criminal appeals do us the great service of adding much of interest on this important but neglected issue in the development of Anglo–North American criminal procedure. The opaqueness of the legal history of criminal appeals stands in stark contrast to their centrality and apparent naturalness in contemporary criminal justice systems in England, Canada, and the United States. These three papers look at the period leading up to and immediately following the creation of the first formalized system of what we might call criminal appeals, the establishment of the Court of Crown Cases Reserved (CCCR) in 1848. This key period in the development of the adversary criminal trial was marked by both a concerted political effort to codify and rationalize the criminal law and by profound structural changes in the management of criminal justice.

Type
Forum: Comments
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 297 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2011

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References

1. Langbein, John H., The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

2. Whitman, James Q., The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

3. Hay, Douglas, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law” in Albion's Fatal Tree (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 59–60.Google Scholar Of course, Hay's general account of the eighteenth century English criminal justice system provoked substantial debate. See, for example, Langbein, John H., “Albion's Fatal Flaws” Past and Present 98 (1983): 96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” 19.

5. Berger, Benjamin L., “Criminal Appeals as Jury Control: An Anglo-Canadian Historical Perspective on the Rise of Criminal Appeals,” Canadian Criminal Law Review 10 (1) (2005): 1 at 11–12.Google Scholar

6. Langbein, John H., “The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” University of Chicago Law Review 45 (1978) 263 at 300–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. See Berger, “Criminal Appeals,” 3–5; Langbein, Origins, 321–31.