Miranda at 50

Marking Miranda v. Arizona's anniversary, ABAJournal.com has a slideshow, 50 Years of Miranda in Popular Culture, compiled by Brenan Sharp.


Photo collage by Brenan Sharp

For an overview, see the pages on Miranda  in the U.S. Courts' materials for schools.

Here are some of our recent books on confessions:

• Richard Rogers & Eric York Drogin, Mirandized Statements: Successfully Navigating the Legal and Psychological Issues (2014) (ABA)
• Barry C. Feld, Kids, Cops, and Confessions Inside the Interrogation Room (2012) (e-book)
• Lawrence S. Wrightsman & Mary L. Pitman, The Miranda Ruling: Its Past, Present, and Future (2012)
• Alan M. Goldstein & Naomi E. Sevin Goldstein, Evaluating Capacity to Waive Miranda Rights (2010)
• Rob Warden & Steven A. Drizin, True Stories of False Confessions (2009)
• Gary L. Stuart, Miranda: The Story of America's Right to Remain Silent (2004) (also available as e-book).
• Richard A. Leo, Police Interrogation and American Justice (2008) (also available as e-book)

As you might imagine, Miranda has been cited a lot. A whole heck of a lot. KeyCite shows 116,042 citing references, including 59,453 cases and 9,452 secondary sources. Within the secondary sources, there are 6,998 law reviews.

How could you choose which law review articles to start with?

Here's a neat trick in HeinOnline. I searched for articles with confess* in the title (the asterisk makes the search include variants, like "confessing" and "confessions").  Result: 1,207 items.

I sorted them to show the articles that have been cited the most at the top of the list.

The most cited was Developments in the Law: Confessions, 79 Harv. L. Rev. 935 (1966), a big survey (nearly 200 pages!) published in March 1966, three months before the Supreme Court decided Miranda.

Next are a couple of works looking at false confessions: Steven A. Drizin & Richard A. Leo, The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World, 82 N.C. L. Rev. 891 (2004); Richard A. Leo & Richard J. Ofshe, Consequences of False Confessions: Deprivations of Liberty and Miscarriages of Justice in the Age of Psychological Interrogation, 88 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 429 (1998).

If you want to know the latest developments, you can sort to see the most recent article first: John C. Sheldon, Common Sense and the Law of Voluntary Confessions: An Essay, 68 Me. L. Rev. 119 (2016).

Searching for "confess*" in the title was very simple. You can put together more complex searches, too. E.g., if you search for "McMurtrie" as an author and "false" within five words of "confession*" in the text, you'll find Jacqueline McMurtrie, The Role of the Social Sciences in Preventing Wrongful Convictions, 42 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1271 (2005).