Is it useful to think about plea bargaining as a form of alternative dispute resolution, in the same vein as the mediation or arbitration of civil disputes, or do the particular moral or procedural imperatives of criminal justice mean that analogies to private dispute resolution are unhelpful or misleading? On the assumption that ADR scholars and criminal law scholars just might have some useful things to say to one another, my colleague Andrea Schneider (who blogs on ADR here) and I organized an interdisciplinary conference on plea bargaining at Marquette in April. Participants included PrawfsBlog alumni Ron Wright and Russ Covey. The three panels addressed these topics: Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law—The Relationship Between the Structure of the Criminal Law and Negotiated Outcomes; Effects of Cognitive Biases on Plea Negotiation; and Victims, Apology, and Restorative Justice in Criminal Procedure.
I, for one, thought we had a rich and helpful exchange of ideas. In any event, papers emerging from the conference will soon appear in a symposium issue of the Marquette Law Review. The introduction Andrea and I wrote for the issue has just gone up on SSRN. This short essay outlines why we think it may be helpful and appropriate to view plea bargaining as a form of dispute resolution and briefly describes the papers included in the issue (many of which are themselves available on SSRN). If anyone would like a hard copy of the full issue when it is available, please let me know by e-mail ([email protected]).
Posted by Michael O’Hear on December 15, 2007 at 03:46 PM