The Gatehouses & Mansions: Fifty Years Later

Alexa Koenig, University of California, Berkeley
Richard Leo, University of San Francisco School of Law

Abstract

In 1965, Yale Kamisar authored “Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure,” an article that would come to have an enormous impact on the development of criminal procedure and American norms of criminal justice. Today, that article is a seminal work of scholarship, hailed for “playing a significant part in producing some of the [Warren] Court’s most important criminal- procedure decisions” (White 2003-04), including Miranda v. Arizona. The most influential concept Kamisar promoted may have been his recognition of a gap that loomed between the Constitutional rights actualized in mansions (courts) versus gatehouses (police stations). Kamisar passionately detailed how the Constitution and its jurisprudential progeny failed to protect suspects when those rights mattered most: when facing questioning by police. This article discusses where this thesis stands today in light of nearly 50 years of legal developments and social science research.