Introduction / R.H. Helmholz -- The privilege and the ius commune : the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century / R.H. Helmholz -- Self-incrimination in interjurisdictional law : the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Charles M. Gray -- The privilege and common law criminal procedure : the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries / John H. Langbein -- The privilege in British North America : the colonial period to the Fifth Amendment / Eben Moglen -- The modern privilege : its nineteenth-century origins / Henry E. Smith -- A peculiar privilege in historical perspective / Albert W. Alschuler.