Richard L. Lippke - The Ethics of Plea Bargaining

Early portions of this book were written while I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Australian National University in the summer of 2007. I especially want to thank John Kleinig for initiating the visit and Tom Campbell and Seumas Miller for organizing the institutional support for it. I subsequently had the pleasure of serving two years as the Robert and Carolyn Frederick Visiting Scholar in Ethics at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, located at DePauw University. Much of the substantive work on the book was completed in that beautiful and stimulating environment. I want to thank Bob Bottoms, Bob Steele, Martha Rainbolt, and Linda Clute for making my time at the Prindle Institute so enjoyable. The students and faculty at DePauw were also extraordinarily welcoming.

Early versions of the first two chapters were read to colleagues at James Madison University, the Indiana University law school, and DePauw University. I also presented a version of at a conference on proof and truth in the law, organized by Larry Laudan, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I want to thank all of the participants at these events for their stimulating questions, comments, and suggestions.

Anyone who wants to write about plea bargaining must begin by studying the biblein this case the many groundbreaking articles by Albert Alschuler on the subject. My substantial debt to his writings will be evident throughout. I remain uncertain that I have anything to say about plea bargaining that he has not already said. When the book was well under way and I believed myself to have a good handle on the topic, I began reading some of the signally important work on criminal law and procedure by the late William Stuntz. I could never think about either topic in the same way afterwards and spent many hours rethinking conclusions that I had reached and about which I had previously been quite confident. I suspect that many other scholars of the law have had the same reaction upon encountering Stuntzs writings.

I want to thank Andrew Ashworth for believing in the book enough to recommend its inclusion in his excellent monograph series. Natasha Knight at Oxford University Press was a constant source of help and encouragement as the manuscript wound its way through the OUP review process. Several reviewers for the Press offered enormously useful comments and suggestions. The final version is much improved because of their efforts.

Portions of some of the chapters have appeared elsewhere. A small part of appeared as Rewarding Cooperation: The Moral Complexities of Procuring Accomplice Testimony, [2010] 13 New Criminal Law Review 90.

Finally, my debt to my wife, Andrea Wiley, and our children, Aidan and Emil, is incalculable. Together they keep me sane, happy, and productive.