ABSTRACT
Inquisition-process had been damaged by Enlightenment critiques to the extent that the adoption of some limited adversarial features had become necessary. But it was by no means moribund. On the contrary, the final years of the 19th century witnessed a vigorous intellectual revolt against the supposed ‘arbitrary’ nature of adversarial due process which, so it was argued, presented a direct threat to the achievement of the progressive goals of ‘social defence’. This was a social Darwinist doctrine which sought to apply the methodology of medical and criminological science in the protection of society from crime (Ancel 1965). In this context, irrational and obstructive due process norms served only to prevent the accurate diagnosis of dangerousness’ and to undermine the effectiveness of the remedial and protective process. This attack on adversariality, which was articulated first by Ferri and Garofalo in the Italian positivist school and later by the international penal reform movement, rapidly became an orthodoxy. It was to have a profound impact upon European attitudes towards the criminal trial and the revival of inquisition-process.
