On the Inquisitorial Spectrum : The Story of Comparative Criminal Procedure
type: CreativeWork
description: This work, On the Inquisitorial Spectrum: The Story of Comparative Criminal Procedure, stands at the intersection of comparative law, legal history, and criminal procedure. It goes beyond merely comparing procedural similarities and differences between legal systems, by proceeding to identify those phenomena and examining them through the broader interdisciplinary lenses of history, ideas and overall tradition and culture. Through an in-depth investigation of the historical and cultural environments of multiple legal traditions, this work aims to achieve three objectives. First, and most significantly, it proposes a new scholarly paradigm which rejects the traditional binary distinction – so prevalent in traditional scholarly analysis – between the “adversarial” model of the common law tradition and the “inquisitorial” model of the continental law tradition. The findings of this work assert – in stark contrast to the traditional model – that the world’s legal traditions, in the area of criminal procedure, are all inquisitional at their core; differences among them are due to divergent locations on the inquisitorial spectrum. This proposed paradigm proposes that legal models of criminal justice (at least surveyed in this work) are merely manifestations or variations of the traditional inquisitorial system. Thus, while the criminal justice system is more decentralized, the roles of the participants vary (for example, the judge is merely reactive, not an active inquisitor) and individual rights are seen as better protected, the “adversarial” model is only an extremely decentralized version of an inquisition. In other words, the “adversarial model” of criminal justice from which much of American exceptionalism stems from, remains a criminal justice model of “parental” or “paternalistic” control, albeit one where the state – operating in a much more laissez-faire fashion – demands that the participants largely resolve disputes amongst themselves on (fictitious) equal ter…
abstract: This work, On the Inquisitorial Spectrum: The Story of Comparative Criminal Procedure, stands at the intersection of comparative law, legal history, and criminal procedure. It goes beyond merely comparing procedural similarities and differences between legal systems, by proceeding to identify those phenomena and examining them through the broader interdisciplinary lenses of history, ideas and overall tradition and culture. Through an in-depth investigation of the historical and cultural environments of multiple legal traditions, this work aims to achieve three objectives. First, and most significantly, it proposes a new scholarly paradigm which rejects the traditional binary distinction – so prevalent in traditional scholarly analysis – between the “adversarial” model of the common law tradition and the “inquisitorial” model of the continental law tradition. The findings of this work assert – in stark contrast to the traditional model – that the world’s legal traditions, in the area of criminal procedure, are all inquisitional at their core; differences among them are due to divergent locations on the inquisitorial spectrum. This proposed paradigm proposes that legal models of criminal justice (at least surveyed in this work) are merely manifestations or variations of the traditional inquisitorial system. Thus, while the criminal justice system is more decentralized, the roles of the participants vary (for example, the judge is merely reactive, not an active inquisitor) and individual rights are seen as better protected, the “adversarial” model is only an extremely decentralized version of an inquisition. In other words, the “adversarial model” of criminal justice from which much of American exceptionalism stems from, remains a criminal justice model of “parental” or “paternalistic” control, albeit one where the state – operating in a much more laissez-faire fashion – demands that the participants largely resolve disputes amongst themselves on (fictitious) equal ter…
author: Amon, Isaac
language: English
keywords: Criminal Procedure
date published: 2019-08-24T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:12:01Z
provider: Washington University in St. Louis
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Washington University in St. Louis