ABSTRACT
Though highly controversial, the origins of plea bargaining are surprisingly obscure. To explain the rise of plea bargaining, thid chapter explores its beginnings in ante-bellum Boston – the first sustained instance of the practice known to exist. Boston was a national center of legal innovation from which many legal ideas and practices spread to other cities through diffusion. In the years after the American Revolution, politicians worked to re-create political authority anew for a self-governing republican society. Recently historians such as Gordon Wood (1992), have shown compellingly how intensely conflicted was the social and political landscape of the early American republic. During the “formative era,” judges began to reconceptualize American law as an instrument of social policy. Plea bargaining appears to have been espoused by old political and social elites whose electoral power was under siege because of the continued control it gave them, in a broad sense, through judicial discretion over sentencing policy.
