The appearance of the privilege against self-incrimination the guaranty that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"' was a landmark event in the history of Anglo-American criminal procedure. Prior historical scholarship has located the origins of the common law privilege in the second half of the seventeenth century, as part of the aftermath of the c...

Over the past twenty years there has been an explosion in the creation, availability, and use of criminal justice databases. Large scale database systems now routinely influence law enforcement decisions ranging from formal determinations to arrest or convict an individual to informal judgments to subject a person to secondary pre-flight screening or investigate possible gang membership. Eviden...

In a recent issue of this Journal, Professor Abraham Goldstein and Research Fellow Martin Marcus discussed their observations about the criminal procedures of three European countries, France, Germany, and Italy, as representative of the "Continental" or "inquisitorial" model of investigation and prosecution.' Their inquiry was prompted, they said, by a desire to probe claims that in those coun...