About the Author
Joel Samaha is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He teaches Introduction to Criminal Justice, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and The Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights, 1865 to the present. He is both a lawyer and an historian whose primary research interest is the history of criminal justice. He received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Professor Samaha also studied under the late Sir Geoffrey Elton at Cambridge University, England. Professor Samaha was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1962. He taught at UCLA before coming to the University of Minnesota in 1971. At the University of Minnesota, he served as Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies from 1974 to 1978. He now teaches and writes full time. He has taught both television and radio courses in criminal justice and has co-taught a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in legal and constitutional history. He was named Distinguished Teacher at the University of Minnesota in 1974. Professor Samaha has published LAW AND ORDER IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, an analysis of law enforcement in pre-industrial English society, and he has transcribed and written a scholarly introduction to a set of criminal justice records in the reign of Elizabeth I. He has also written several articles on the history of criminal justice which have appeared in professional history journals and law reviews. In addition to this text, he has written two other textbooks with Wadsworth, CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, now in its Sixth Edition, and CRIMINAL JUSTICE, also in its Sixth Edition.
