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The Social Origins of Plea Bargaining: Conflict and the Law in the Process of State Formation, 1830-1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Mary E. Vogel
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Abstract

One striking feature of American courts is the widespread practice of plea bargaining. Paradoxically, the practice rewards precisely those who appear guilty. Contrary to popular perception of plea bargaining as an innovation or corruption of the post-World War II years, this study shows the practice to have emerged early in the American republic. Amid social conflict wrought by industrialization, immigration, and urbanization during the Age of Jackson, politicians acutely realized the potential for revolution in Europe. Local political institutions being spare and fragmentary, the courts stepped forward as agents of the state to promote social order necessary for healthy market functioning, personal security, and economic growth. Plea bargaining arose during the 1830s and 1840s as part of a process of political stabilization and an effort to legitimate institutions of self-rule—accomplishments that were vital to Whig efforts to reconsolidate the political power of Boston's social and economic elite. To this end, the tradition of episodic leniency from British common law was recrafted into a new cultural form—plea bargaining—that drew conflicts into courts while maintaining elite discretion over sentencing policy.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , 1999 , pp. 161 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research has benefited from grants from the Mark de Wolfe Howe Fund, the Nuala McGann Drescher Fund, the American Philosophical Society, and the Curley Fund. A fellowship from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at the Radcliffe Research and Study Center of Harvard University during 1992–93 and a stay as Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation during autumn 1996 and as Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University during 1996–97 afforded time for critical rethinking and, most of all, sustained writing. Opportunities to talk there with Florence Ladd, Morton Horwitz, Ann Thomas, Zipporah Wiseman, Terry Fisher, Aldon Morris, Chris Tomlins and Bryant Garth gready stimulated my work on this study. At various points, my work has benefited from the comments of many scholars at professional meetings or in other forums. Orlando Patterson, Mac Runyan, John Gagnon, Judy Tanur, Mark Granovetter, Michael Schwartz, Steve Rytina, Kitty Calavita, David Greenberg, Allen Steinberg, Wilbur Miller, Alessandro Pizzorno, Jonathan Levy, Yu Xie, Rick Lempert and, especially Tony Long, contributed greatly to this work and any merits it may possess. Its limitations remain, of course, my own. Lynn Itagaki provided valuable research assistance. The anonymous reviewers and the editors offered many superb suggestions. Francis Shiels, Clerk of what is now the Boston Municipal Court, and his office staff, especially Ann Marie Wren, were unflagging in their geniality and assistance in providing access to key court records. David deLorenzo at Special Collections in Langdell Library of Harvard Law School gave generously of his vast knowledge of 19th-century legal materials. The Department of Sociology and the members of the Center for the Study of Social Transformation at the University of Michigan have provided lively intellectual communities in which to bring this work to fruition. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, before that, many of these ideas were presented in nascent form and benefited greatly from the comments of students in my graduate seminars on comparative historical sociology and sociology of law. My thanks to each of them.

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