Kamisar, Yale (1929–)

Yale Kamisar began teaching law at the University of Minnesota in 1957. He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1965, where he quickly distinguished himself as one of the nation’s two or three greatest criminal justice scholars and where he taught until his retirement in 2004. For more than forty-five years, he has been a leading influence on the ways in which the judiciary, the legal academy, practicing lawyers, and law students thought about constitutional criminal procedure.

Since 1964, Kamisar has been a co-author of a widely popular constitutional law casebook—now in its ninth edition—and, since 1965, the lead author of the most widely used and most frequently cited criminal procedure casebook—now in its eleventh edition. Over the past forty-five years, at least thirty-two Supreme Court decisions and more than 100 decisions of the federal courts of appeals have cited Kamisar’s scholarship. Most impressive are several landmark criminal procedure decisions that have rested—at least in part—on Kamisar’s work. Foremost among them is Miranda v. Arizona, where the Court adopted the reasoning and doctrinal framework of Kamisar’s article, Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure, en route to holding that the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination requires police to advise a suspect of his or her right to remain silent and to counsel before any inculpatory statements made by the suspect may be used against him or her at trial.

In addition to the law of interrogation, Kamisar has written extensively on the law of search and seizure, the exclusionary rule, and challenging social policy issues, such as mandatory drug testing, flag burning, and euthanasia.

JEAN-CLAUDE ANDRE´

References and Further Reading

• Choper, Jesse H., et al., eds. Constitutional Law: Cases, Comments, and Questions. Ninth Edition. St. Paul: West, 2001.
• Kamisar, Yale. ‘‘Equal justice in the gatehouses and mansions of American criminal procedure.’’ in Howard, A.E. Dick, ed. Criminal Justice in Our Time. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965.
• Kamisar, Yale, et al., eds. Modern Criminal Procedure: Cases, Comments, and Questions. 11th Ed. St. Paul: West, 2005.
• Tributes. Yale Kamisar, Michigan Law Review 102 8 (August 2004): 8:1673–1792.
• Tributes. Yale Kamisar, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 2 (Fall 2004): 1:1–66.

Cases and Statutes Cited

• Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)

See also Exclusionary Rule; Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966); Rights of the Accused; Self-Incrimination: Miranda and Evolution