Professor Kamisar’s greatest impact on the court came in 1966, in his decision in Miranda.
The year before, he’d published a lengthy essay comparing the American justice system to a gatehouse and a mansion—the gatehouse was the police interrogation room and the mansion the courtroom.
“The courtroom is a beautiful place where defense attorneys roar and stomp and accusers are locked in in a variety of ways,” he wrote. “But what happens before a suspect reaches safety and enjoys the comfort of this real mansion? Ah, there’s the pinch. Usually he first has to go through a much less pretentious building, a police station with bare back rooms and closed doors.”
The courts provided comprehensive protection, rooted in the Fifth Amendment, which covered the right to self-incrimination. But no such protection existed in the police station, where interrogators could force a suspect to confess.
No justice system could last long, Professor Kamisar argued, if it relied on the accused’s forced information flow. The court agreed. In a 1966 decision written by Chief Justice Warren and citing the work of Professor Kamisar, it ruled that criminal suspects should be made aware of their rights before questioning, especially their right to remain silent and to receive legal advice. .
That same year, Time magazine wrote that “At 37 years old, Kamisar has already produced a torrent of speeches and endless writings that easily make him the most overwhelming criminal justice scholar in the US”. Others called him the “father of Miranda”.
With the imprimatur of the Supreme Court, Professor Kamisar spent the rest of his career building his chosen field — co-authoring the lead casebook, “Modern Criminal Procedure” (Professor Kerr later co-authored) — defending the Miranda – statement of conservative push back.
Professor Kamisar’s care for the vulnerable, and his concerns about the extent of government power, motivated his other area of interest: assisted suicide and euthanasia. If his stance on the accused’s rights earned him admirers among bourgeois libertarians, many of those same people have been stunned by his opposition to laws that appear to enshrine an equally important right to one’s own death.