Theoretical Foundations of Criminal Trial Procedure

The articles and essays reproduced in this volume explore the 'theoretical foundations' of 'criminal trial procedure'. This is a precise, but also fundamentally question-begging, description of the book's scope and ambitions. Viewed in isolation, each of the components of its title might be regarded as conceptually problematic.

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.