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The reunification of Germany once again has turned American heads toward German law. This interest in things German, of course, is nothing new. Savigny's historical school influenced American legal thought in the nineteenth century. 1 Roscoe Pound and the legal realists drew on the work of Jhering and the Free Lawyers. 2 More recently Niklas Luhmann and Jirgen Habermas have found an interested audience among American legal academics. 3 Moreover, the German civil and criminal justice systems have been proposed as models for reform in the United States. 4 In particular, it has been argued repeatedly that adopting the German" mixed court" of professional and lay judges would make the American criminal justice system more efficient and allow more criminal defendants to avail themselves of their constitutional right to jury trial. 5