Today, the criminal system and the civil system operate as distinct institutional settings with very different rules. But this was not always so. Indeed, prior to the 1940s, both domains operated in similar ways. This changed when federal reform created the Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure. The Article is the first to contend that federal reform, which took place within the overarching project of Jim Crow, wrote race into procedure and contributed to the construction of separate and unequal courtrooms.The new rules empowered civil litigants, virtually all of them white, to exercise agency over their case. But rules governing the criminal forum gave control over facts and law to just one party, the prosecutor. The new regime empowered the prosecutor to serve as a fiduciary to the entrenchment of prejudice, permitting him to distribute or withhold facts according to the race of the defendant. This account complicates the prevailing view that the Supreme Court intervened in the 1930s to temper Jim Crow practices in the criminal arena. While the Court's due process doctrine mitigated the ways in which states trampled the rights of black defendants, the Court also superintended the development of new rules that, in every case, rendered black defendants more vulnerable to state oppression.The Article finally observes that our state and federal procedural systems today operate pursuant to key features of this Jim Crow blueprint, and considers a legacy that still distributes burdens and benefits in racially salient ways.
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--posted by Mitra Sharafi
