Benefits of the Common Law legal System

A legal system is a system used for interpreting and enforcing the laws. The most original or commonly know legal system that has shaped much of what exists today is know as the Common Law. There are three major legal systems of legal procedure; each having their own set of rules called criminal procedure guidelines. These three systems are the adversarial, inquisitorial, and popular (mixed) systems of criminal procedure (Dammer & Albanese, 2011).
The adversarial system is a legal system used in the Common Law countries, such as England and the United States, where two advocates represent their parties’ positions before an impartial person or group of people, usually a jury or judge, who attempt to determine the truth of the case. For many centuries, defendants were forbidden to have legal representation and lawyers rarely appeared for prosecution duty; as trials were specifically meant to be an event where the defendant answers to the charges in person (Langbein, 2003). Inspired by the Enlightenment period, the adversarial system was developed due to a string of treason trials in England, which led to a change in the way the accused could defend themselves (Dammer & Albanese, 2011). The transformation from the prior lawyer-free system to the now, lawyer-dominated, happened within a century, from the 1690’s to the 1780’s (Langbein, 2003).
In order to investigate and determine the guilt or innocence of the accused an adversarial approach is used. The adversarial system seeks the truth by pitting the prosecution and the defense against each other with the hopes that competition will reveal it. It is because of the competition this is often compared to a game or contest in which both side are trying to win. Primary responsibility...

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