Richard Fenno (1962: 315) has suggested that: “[I] f one considers the main activity of a political system to be decision making, the acid test of its internal integration is its capacity to make collective decisions without flying apart in the process.” In the context of the Congress, Fenno (1962: 310) defined committee integration as: “the degree to which there is a working together or a meshing together or mutual support among its roles and subgroups. Conversely, it is also defined as the degree to which a committee is able to minimize conflict among its roles and its subgroups, by heading off or resolving the conflicts that arise. A concomitant of integration is the existence of a fairly consistent set of norms, widely agreed upon and widely followed by the members.”

Only a small fraction of the criminal cases in the United States are decided by adversary trial processes. The vast majority are settled by guilty pleas; many of these pleas occur after some form of plea bargaining — either explicit negotiations over the entry of a guilty plea in exchange for a reduced charge or a lenient sentence, or tacit bargaining, as when the defendant pleads guilty in anticipation of lenient sentencing. The most frequently cited reason for plea bargaining is administrative expediency or “its utility in disposing of large numbers of cases in a quick and simple way” (Enker, 1967: 112). While caseload pressures are doubtlessly important, they may be overemphasized in the current literature.' Frequently both the prosecutor and the defendant want to avoid a full jury trial because of the risk and uncertainty involved. The prosecutor is under administrative and/or political pressure not to lose his case; a negotiated plea of guilty, even if on a reduced charge, is a sure conviction, while conviction by trial is never certain. The defendant's risk at trial is that his sentence on conviction may be much stiffer than if he had pleaded guilty.

Why study the legal systems of other times or places? Are there reasons beyond an antiquarianism or exoticism that seeks stimulation for a palate jaded by preoccupation with the minutiae of American law? The increased understanding to be gained by such intellectual exploration seems to me similar in origin to the pleasure any of us takes in travel. Differences of physical environment, modes of social intercourse, or patterns of culture awaken us to phenomena which at home are so familiar as to be almost invisible. When we resume our mundane round, the residue of such impressions compels us to recognize the contingency of our own ways, and leads us to look for explanations.