Investigative Criminal Procedure (American Casebook Series)

Kamin and Bascuas' Investigative Criminal Procedure, 3d provides an up-to-date, historically grounded understanding of the pre-trial rights guaranteed by the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Rather than focusing on the holdings of individual cases, it focuses on broader concepts and themes. Carefully edited majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions convey the development of constitutional criminal procedure law, exposing the way arguments ebb and flow over time and across various doctrines. The Supreme Court’s classic and recent cases are reproduced and organized around a politically agnostic conceptual approach, allowing students to grasp the competing theories and concepts underlying searches and seizures, interrogations, and the exclusionary rules. “Points for Discussion” following each case focus students on the areas of disagreement among the justices, facilitating class preparation. Our goal is to get the students to think critically about why the law is the way it is, what alternatives are possible, and what theories and values underlie the Court's doctrine.

Unlike textbooks that proceed from a particular ideological viewpoint, this book proceeds by defining, through the study of cases, the key constitutional terms pertaining to criminal procedure — for example, “search,” “seizure,” “probable cause,” “custody,” “interrogation,” and “prosecution” — and then examining how the Supreme Court’s understanding of those concepts has changed over time. The book endeavors to give equal attention to all the justices’ competing jurisprudential views and invites students to draw their own conclusions as to which more faithfully accords with the nation’s founding principles. The overriding objective is to encourage critical thought by requiring students to read the cases closely, to distinguish between adjudication and exercises of raw power, and ultimately to assess the validity of legal doctrines in light of history, logic, and precedent.