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I am an outsider to both the US and the UK legal system, and living in Austria have grown up in a legal system very similar to the German one.

From this perspective your last sentence struck me as odd, since, for example, I distinctly remember the UK settling a very high profile corruption case with BAE [1]. Maybe it does not happen that often, but it still seems to be problematic in some cases.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bribe/2010/02/bae-...

There are limits to plea bargains in the UK. One such limit is that a bargain can only be made if prosecutor and defendant agree upon the defendant pleading guilty on some charges while the remaining charges are dropped. Moreover, the court still has to decide on the appropriate penalty (considering only the charges that haven't been dropped, of course), that is there is no binding agreement on penalty between prosecution and defendant.

Plea bargaining does happen in the UK and can be problematic in those cases but it's nowhere near as excessive as in the US.

That's under English law. Under Scots law and Northern Irish law there are no plea bargains.

On your first point, as a non-expert in law and law history, I wonder to what extent these differences in trial procedure are rooted in the difference between common law and civil law.

To add to the examples, I'd say that France and Italy have procedures very similar to those described as the German system, and indeed all have a civil law system.

However, the link does not seem that obvious : the way trials are organized is not necessarily dependent on the way law is built.

The adversarial system and principles like "being judged by one's peers" are deeply ingrained in common law systems. Generally, the underlying ideas are good as they're meant to limit the authorities' powers to bring people to trial.

Ironically, just like for the American plea bargaining, the risk of the German system is hardest for those actually innocent. The differential between falsely confessing and not might not be as much as in the American system, but in the end it has the same effect. The innocent face even longer imprisonment if they insist on their innocence, in Germany it just works over the rehabilitation angle. The prison system will judge the refusal to show remorse and not trying to make amends as sign of lack of rehabilitation which will lead to a full imprisonment without early release, as opposed to the guilty case who is probable to get out after I think 60% of his time.

I'm not sure how much the UK is a good counterexample; the author of this paper seems to treat is as more similar to the United States than to the civil law systems like Germany (he commonly refers to the "Anglo-American" practice of plea-bargaining). Indeed, he holds up the UK's high rates of plea bargaining as proof that the cause of the oddities of the American system is the adversarial trial procedure that characterizes common law systems.

Plea bargaining in the UK is very different though, the bargain is around pleading to some charges to get others dropped - with the judge determining the sentence.

And with sentencing guidelines published for all common offences the prosecutor is not able to threaten you with massive sentences because you (or your lawyer) can know what the likely outcome is. For a first time offender the odds of jail for almost any offence is low.

The quality of legal representation provided, especially in trials facing major jail time is significantly better. For a big case you will have a Queens Council barrister defending you who is just as experienced as the prosecutor.

And finally the Crown Prosecution Service is far less interested in the sentence than it is in the successful outcome. In other words their statistics look just as good if you plead to one very minor charge compared to several major ones. So plea bargaining here is much more about reducing their workload than it is in scoring political points.

If you are truly innocent (or believe yourself to be in the case of Aaron) then trusting then plea bargains are not for you in the UK.

This is very English-centric, for what it's worth. Plea bargains are an oddity under English law (they don't exist elsewhere in the UK), and the CPS is equally English.

Apart from that about plea bargains, it does mostly hold true in Scotland/NI.

Indeed, he holds up the UK's high rates of plea bargaining...

I am not sure you read the same paper as anyone else. Nowhere did I see this. In fact, the author more or less said the exact opposite on page 215. Also, this paper is dated 1979.

Plea negotiation, let alone plea bargaining, is rare in the UK. The UK government only in the last decade began to accept the use of plea bargaining in corporate crime. Occassionally, plea negotiation can also occur, most commonly in co-conspirator cases like gang assaults, but again this is uncommon.

To compare the absolutely routine use of plea bargaining in the US to their rarity in the UK would be well beyond a stretch.

I'm not sure what paper you're reading either.

Page 210: "Plea bargaining has been documented in Eng- land where crime rates are closer to German than to American levels; the constant factor in both England and the United States is, of course, adversary criminal procedure."

All that's talked about on page 215 is that "in contemporary [1979] England, official ideology has been until lately loath to acknowledge the existence of plea bargaining," but that it is in fact well-documented (as an example showing that, if there were an unofficial plea bargaining system in Germany, it would be easy to discover by interviews of legal counsel).

I agree that the US is indeed a more extreme case (especially in not limiting plea bargaining to certain types of cases and openly accepting plea bargaining in principle), but this author clearly believes that the causative factor in both cases is the complexity of common law trial procedure (which, again, seems to have reached extremes in the US that are unmatched in the UK).

There is no "UK legal system". English law (covering the historic Kingdom of England, i.e., England and Wales) and Scots law (covering the historic Kingdom of Scotland, i.e., Scotland), and Northern Ireland law are all separate common law jurisdictions with their own oddities, and though they share some laws the extent to which precedents cross the different jurisdictions is unclear.

It's not quite correct to say that Scots law is entirely independent though. It's true that The High Court of Justiciary is the highest court of appeal for Scottish criminal cases, but the Supreme Court of the UK (formerly the House of Lords) is the highest court of appeal for civil cases in the UK and decisions in Scotland can be appealed there. However, the rules and procedures of Scots law are different and so judgements in England which are used as precedents in Scotland have to be reinterpreted in the light of Scots law and visa versa. I know for a fact that there is a standard contract clause which currently has a different interpretation in England versus Scotland because neither of the interpretations have yet been appealed in the Supreme Court. As you can imagine this can cause endless amounts of expensive legal haggling. Scots and English law also use very different legal terminology and procedures for many everyday processes. Interestingly, this is because Scots law is a mixture of civil law derived from Roman law (like most of Europe) and common law (like England, US, Australia, Canada etc).

Also, I think English law can in theory draw on precedents set by courts in other commonwealth countries; I vaguely remember seeing Australian case-law cited when I was studying law related to professional negligence, but I can't find a reference to it now.

It's a very typically British setup which is the culmination of 100's of years of compromises here and there which viewed together now are totally impenetrable to the layman. The whole setup is utterly confusing and should be thrown away and rewritten from scratch preferably with the same law applying over the whole of the EU if you ask me, but then I'm not a lawyer.