Creating ( and Teaching ) the Bail - To - Jail Course

Yale Kamisar has explained how events that occurred about fifty years ago led to the creation of a stand-alone criminal procedure course and, a few years later, led to the division of that stand-alone course into two courses. The second of those courses came to be called, almost from the outset, the “Jail-to-Bail” course. My focus today is on why that course was created and how it was shaped. Modern Criminal Procedure, as Yale has noted, was the first coursebook designed for a stand-alone course in criminal procedure. Modern was published in 1966. A year earlier, the first version of Modern was published under a different title, Basic Criminal Procedure. Basic, a 350-page paperback, was presented as a replacement for the criminal procedure portion of the typical criminal law coursebook. The first-year Criminal Law course covered both substantive criminal law and criminal procedure in a four-credit course. While the titles of the major coursebooks gave equal billing to the substantive and procedural sides, the page allocation heavily favored the substantive criminal law. Livingston Hall was a coauthor of one of the major criminal law casebooks, Hall and Glueck’s Criminal Law and Its Enforcement.1 He agreed with Yale that a different approach was needed for the coverage of the criminal procedure portion of the Criminal Law course, and signed on as a co-author of the materials that Yale had already prepared. Hall and Kamisar’s Basic Criminal Procedure hopefully would be used by instructors assigning the Hall and Glueck coursebook. It could also be combined with various other coursebooks that followed the traditional approach to the presentation of the criminal procedure portion of the Criminal Law course. That traditional approach presented materials designed for a survey-type coverage of criminal procedure in roughly 15 to 20 class hours. Thus, the Hall and Glueck coursebook included a combination of text, statutes, and cases on each major step in the process, starting with “methods of obtaining evidence” and finishing with “sentencing procedures.” Even where the materials on a particular procedure included more than a single case, the coverage tended to focus on only a