Reconstructing the English Codification Debate: The Criminal Law Commissioners, 1833–45

Abstract

Sir Henry Maine, the eminent Victorian jurist, once remarked, in frustration at being unable to secure his desired reforms of the Indian criminal law, that no one cared about the penal code except theorists and habitual criminals. This has been the recurrent lament of the English criminal lawyer. Repeated initiatives in the field of codification over the last 150 years have enjoyed little popular support or understanding, and as the most recent project stumbles forward into its fourth decade, an air of fatalism surrounds the entire question of the code. There are calls for a new political initiative to revive the project, and there have been more modest appeals for a reexamination of the principles of existing penal legislation, though neither seems likely to provoke much response. Yet, for all of the recent discussion of codes and codification, the question of the significance of codification to the modern law remains something of an enigma.