Comparative Criminal Procedure Through Film

Samuel Bettwy, adjunct professor of law, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has published Comparative Criminal Procedure Through Film: Analytical Tools & Law and Film Summaries By Legal Tradition and Country (Vanderplas Publishing, 2015). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

This textbook describes analytical tools for studying comparative criminal procedure through film and provides summaries of the law of 50 countries and of over 270 films that depict criminal procedure in action in those countries. The traditional tools of comparative analysis include the inquisitorial-adversarial dichotomy, role-specific constructs and the Civil Law-Common Law dichotomy. In addition, differences in criminal procedure can be examined through the socialist, Islamic and indigenous legal traditions and through the evolving international legal regimes. The tools of comparative legal analysis are applied to examine the adjudicative process through film, beginning with police contact with a crime suspect and ending either with a judge or jury’s acquittal or with execution of sentence. The law summaries describe the distinctive criminal procedure of each legal tradition and of each country within those traditions. For each country, the film summaries describe background information about the film and the filmmaker, the plot of the film as a whole and the legal story contained within. The textbook is designed for teaching law students, but is also suitable for teaching an undergraduate or post-graduate college course in comparative criminal justice.
 

The book is available in print and ebook editions.