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The fifth edition of Understanding Criminal Procedure: Adjudication brings the treatise up to date on all of the newest developments in the rules that govern the criminal process after the police investigation ends and the adjudicative process commences. Recent years have brought important changes and new debates to the forefront, both in areas governed by constitutional doctrine, such as the Confrontation Clause and the trial by jury provision of the Sixth Amendment, and in matters largely governed at the local level, such as the use of algorithms and big data in bail hearings and new rules on discovery. The new edition explains this entire landscape in carefully organized chapters describing where we are, how we got here, and where further developments may be expected.

The treatise covers the most important United States Supreme Court cases in the adjudicatory portion of criminal procedure and, where pertinent, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, federal statutes, and lower federal and state court cases are considered. The broad overarching policy issues of criminal procedure are laid out and some of the hottest debates in the field are considered in depth and objectively. The authors have also included citations to important scholarship, both classic and recent, into which readers may delve more deeply regarding specific topics.