About the Book

Organized and presented for students who may not be familiar with comparative and international law, Plea Bargaining Across Borders: Criminal Procedure features:

• coverage of three types of jurisdictions
  * those that allow plea bargaining in all cases (e.g., the United States and international criminal courts)
  * those that allow plea bargaining only for minor crimes (e.g., Germany, Bulgaria)
  * those that do not formally allow plea bargaining under any circumstances (e.g., Japan), but that employ practices that are functionally similar to plea bargaining
• a consistent internal chapter structure:
  * a brief history of plea bargaining in each jurisdiction
  * relevant primary sources of law
  * analysis that focuses on the participants, timing, and setting of negotiations and on the subject matter of plea agreements
  * discussion of the legal conditions for a valid guilty plea
  * discussion of the law regarding withdrawal of a guilty plea and breach of a plea agreement
  * scholarly commentary supporting or criticizing plea bargaining
  * hypothetical drug trafficking and homicide scenarios
• realistic hypothetical scenarios that depict plea bargaining in different kinds of criminal cases and require students to apply the laws of different jurisdictions to similar facts
• a unique combination of primary and secondary source materials, including interviews with practitioners and scholarly commentary
• Questions and Notes that fuel class discussion
• discussion of plea bargaining at international criminal courts, such as the international criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court
• free-standing chapters that allow instructors to tailor the coverage to their own teaching objectives
• Professor’s Notes that offer guidance for teaching, link the hypotheticals to core course content, and reference additional materials addressing specific countries and comparative and international criminal procedure generally

Incorporating materials common to the leading criminal procedure casebooks, Plea Bargaining Across Borders can be easily adapted to your criminal procedure syllabus.  The entire book may be assigned over four or five classes, or single chapters may be inserted into the semester to introduce a transnational perspective to your course.