The goal of this book is to provide a general and practical overview of how American criminal justice works for readers who have not studied the subject, and who may not have a background in the American legal system generally. It explores, and tries to explain, some inherently distinctive features of American criminal procedures.

The idea for the book sprang from the May 14, 2011, arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and a likely candidate for the President of France, on charges that he had sexually attacked a chambermaid in the New York hotel where he had been staying. A bit over three months later, the District Attorney of New York submitted a memorandum in court asking that all the charges against him be dismissed. The sequence of procedures between these two events transfixed French readers and television viewers. As a former US federal prosecutor then living in Paris and a member of the Paris Bar, I appeared frequently on French radio and TV to explain the American criminal procedures that were suddenly becoming daily news in France. It was often a challenge, because the first reaction of many was to conclude that procedures that were so difficult to understand must somehow be less fair, that principles of justice so different from their own must somehow be less “just.” This experience and others like it led to the development of an academic course on comparative criminal procedures, which I have now taught at the University of Amsterdam and Columbia Law School, and to lectures that I have presented in France at the Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature and Paris 2.