The trial is central to the institutional framework of criminal justice. It provides the procedural link between crime and punishment, and is the forum in which both guilt and innocence and sentence are determined. Its continuing significance is evidenced by the heated responses drawn by recent British government proposals to reform rules of criminal procedure and evidence so as to alter the status of the trial within the criminal justice process and to limit the role of the jury. Yet for all of the attachment to trial by jury and to principles safeguarding the right to a fair trial there has...

What are the aims of a criminal trial? What social functions should it perform? And how is the trial as a political institution linked to other institutions in a democratic polity? If we understand a criminal trial as calling a defendant to answer to a charge of criminal wrongdoing and, if he is judged to be responsible for such wrongdoing, what follows to account for his conduct? A normative theory of the trial-an account of what trials ought to be and of what ends they should serve-must take these central aspects of the trial seriously, but they raise a number of difficult questions. They...