Amar tends to focus on doctrinally interesting cases rather than on issues that more commonly influence actual outcomes of criminal trials. The book, however, rarely discusses constitutional rights to the resources necessary to conduct an adequate defense or issues of effective assistance of counsel, matters responsible for a significantly higher percentage of innocent persons being found guilty than the rare case where prosecutors insist on prosecuting one person in the face of evidence that another person identified by the defendant is guilty. Hence, the rule requiring dismissal of all cases where there is untoward delay before trial may simply recognize that in most cases delay adversely affects the defense in ways that cannot always be clearly identified. Amar's focus on legal categories also causes him to make observations that stray from common sense. Persons may be guilty of some crimes they are charged with but not of others.
Constitutionalism done properly is a multidisciplinary exercise.
Professor Amar has made an important contribution to that exercise by elaborating in great detail the status of constitutional criminal procedure at the time of the framing and the confused evolution of constitutional criminal procedure at present. Constitutional analysis, however, is hardly exhausted by traditional legal analysis. Constitutional social science is needed to identify the reasons for evolution, discover how various constitutional procedures are actually functioning and predict the consequences of proposed reforms. The constitutional criminal procedures of a polity entering the twenty-first century should not be based exclusively on the words of an eighteenth century text as translated by a twentieth century law professor, no matter how sacred the text or erudite the law professor.