The Black Book of England, Exhibiting the Existing State, Policy and Administration of the United Kingdom; Exhibiting the Existing State, Policy, and Administration of the United Kingdom (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: have been partly sought to be neutralized. The French bar, as ours would do, unless prohibited for obvious motives, still preferring to a simple and scientific body of law, to perplex and impede justice by interminable dilations ton and reference to the old Pays de Coutume, reports and provincial law books. In this way only could law reform be made effective, and society be relieved of that mass of letter-press which is almost as expensively oppressive as the National Debt. It would be a great change, but a wholesome one, and one in which the difficulties have been greatly exaggerated. There are, it is said, fifteen definitions of " theft." But there is only one that is just, and which that is, it could hardly be difficult for three clever persons to define. It was one of the objections of Lord Lyndhurst that the Criminal Law Commissioners had erred in defining " conspiracy." Like theft, it has many descriptions, but has only a single true one, and this is precisely what the community seeks to have settled by competent authority. Chief Justice Denman, on the same occasion, held that a digest of the written law might be feasible, but doubted the practicability of so dealing with the unwritten law. In this, we apprehend, his lordship has been misled by some erroneous associations. There is, in truth, no essential difference between the written and unwritten law of England. It is all written law, all in letterpress,?parliamentary, judicial, and traditionary laws, are all in books?are referred to in books?would, if digested, be taken from books?and, probably, nearly the same aliquot proportions of each would be found in force and obsolete. It is a distinction made by law writers, but has lost its discriminative character, from House of Lords, May 13, 1844. the mass of the s...