Criminal law is a powerful legal tool in Canadian society consisting of numerous procedural rules but little organization. Provisions of the Criminal Code that are directly relevant to each other are often separated by many different (and usually irrelevant) sections and subsections. The common law rules of criminal procedure, meanwhile, are often established incrementally, in numerous cases decided over a long period of time. With both the Code and common law, it can be difficult and time-consuming to assemble and explain the entire legal framework governing a particular police power or court procedure. This deficiency in the law is what led authors Steve Coughlan and Alex Gorlewski to create a comprehensible resource that clarifies the relationships among the individual statutory provisions and the common law rules of criminal procedure.

The Anatomy of Criminal Procedure: A Visual Guide to the Law illustrates the law of criminal procedure through nearly seventy annotated charts and diagrams. Across the whole criminal process — from search and seizure to appeals and sentencing — this book consolidates the statutory and common law rules around each step, visually depicts how they fit together, and explains in detailed annotations how the rules work and have been interpreted by courts. This is a valuable text for practitioners who work with the criminal process every day, as well as for students learning it for the first time. Coughlan and Gorlewski aim to outline the law as it was created and implemented by our institutions, while providing the coherence it sometimes lacks yet certainly requires.

Steve Coughlan is a professor of law and the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University in Halifax. He received an LL.B. from Dalhousie Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto, both in 1985. He has practised law with the Metro Community Law Clinic and with the Dalhousie Legal Aid Service, and also worked with the criminal procedure project of the Law Reform Commission of Canada. Having worked at Dalhousie Law School in a variety of capacities, he was appointed to a tenure-track position in 2000, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001, and became a full Professor in 2004. His areas of teaching have included criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, health law, and appellate advocacy. His students have won many prizes at competitive moots, including first place overall in the Commonwealth Law Moot. Professor Coughlan has received teaching awards at the faculty, university, and regional levels, including the Dalhousie Law School Teaching Excellence Award, the Hannah and Harold Barnett Award for Excellence in Teaching First Year Law, the Dalhousie University Alumni Association Award of Excellence for Teaching, and the Association of Atlantic Universities Distinguished Teacher Award.

  Professor Coughlan is the author of Detention and Arrest (with Glen Luther, Irwin Law, 2010) and Criminal Procedure, 2d ed. (Irwin Law, 2012). He is an editor of the Criminal Reports and an author of the National Judicial Institute Criminal Law e-Letter. He is also a co-author of the Carswell Annual Review of Criminal Law and of Learning Canadian Criminal Law (as of the 10th ed.). In addition, he is a member of the Law and Technology Institute at the Schulich School of Law and is one of the authors of the Canadian IT Law Association’s newsletter on law and technology issues. The majority of his more than 150 articles, annotations, chapters, reports, and books have been in the criminal law field, but he has also published in other fields, including health law (particularly with regard to issues of elder abuse) and the future of the legal profession.

Steve Coughlan's profile page

Alex Gorlewski is a graduate of the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. He is currently an LLM candidate at Queen’s University, researching the histories of evidentiary and procedural rules in sexual assault trials.

Alex Gorlewski's profile page