This course focuses on selected main developments in criminal justice history in America, mainly since 1850. It interrelates practices and ideas regarding criminal responsibility, punishment and the jury, stressing both points of coordination and points of tension among these matters. In particular, the course examines tensions between official legal rules and broadly social ideas and attitudes with respect to responsibility and punishment. It considers the ways in which use of the criminal trial jury has reflected these tensions and, to a considerable extent, shaped the course of American criminal justice and its administration. The course proceeds by way of lecture and class discussion. The course does not assume a background in American history.