Wickedness and Crime by Penny Crofts

Author:Penny Crofts [Crofts, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Law, General, Criminal Law, Jurisprudence, Legal History
ISBN: 9781136703058
Google: 6bPfAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-30T15:59:55+00:00

Stephen's criticisms that Hale's work was ‘ill-arranged’ and ‘its total want of unity and simplicity’ suggest that Hale's treatise was beyond redemption. It failed to deliver the goals of simplicity, and provided a means by which Stephen could distinguish and uphold his own work.39 Stephen also suggests that Hale's work was no longer relevant – it had been altered by legislation. He also accomplished a minor swipe at other treatise writers who he had criticised elsewhere for their repetition – that they had only altered Hale ‘to some extent’. The problem for Stephen, and the reason why he expressed so much malice towards Hale, was that he was dependent upon him – ‘it constitutes the principal part of our existing law’. Stephen could not ignore or create the law anew; he had to engage with Hale.

Stephen (1883c: 52–53) reserved particular malice not only for Coke's work – ‘to the last degree unsystematic and ill-arranged’, clumsy and intricate – but also for Coke himself, the ‘author's mind’ had a ‘disorderly character’. There were two interrelated issues that aroused Stephen's ire. First, Coke was a respected authority and a progenitor of criminal law (Stephen 1883c: 52):

I now come to Coke's Third Institute, a work which, not by reason of its own merits, but because of the reputation of its author, may be regarded as the second source of the criminal law, Bracton being regarded as the first.

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