ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the transposition of the logic of the trade that characterizes plea bargaining in US practice through a consideration of the 20 guilty pleas before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It examines how much, and under what circumstances, the 'trade' that animates the practice at US law has taken root in ICTY jurisprudence. The chapter argues that the absence of meaningful 'strategy' offered by pleading guilty at the ICTY is centrally due to a combination of continental legal typology's discomfort with 'negotiated justice' as well as institutional practices. Structural and cultural elements of the 'trade' however - elements best understood in terms of how such a 'trade' might meaningfully constitute a 'defense strategy' - are often, although not always, lost in ICTY practice. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, two formerly continentally-styled judicial systems with no historical bargaining practice, plea agreements have been instituted.
