David Sugarman 232 The complex and obscure character of England’s criminal lawwas the subject of frequent criticismthroughout the nineteenth century.More generally many of the modern principles governing major departments of the law, such as contract law and torts, are of recent vintage, that is, the creatures of nineteenth and twentieth century juristic and judicial law-making.5^ As with so much of popular discourse, many of the older “keywords”^^ of the law have assumed entirely new meanings during the last 150 years. II. The Formof Law A striking feature of the English legal system is its deliberately unprincipled nature: the accumulative features of case law and statute law-the 1834 Lawas an amendment of the 1604 Poor La Act which remained in force until 1948, some words being incorporated into the 1948 Act! As a Continental historian put it: “[The] problem of a code of law was hardly ever posed in England, and certainly if it had been it would have presented very great difficulties. For the laws, even the oldest of them, remained on the Statute Book, and accumulated in increasing numbers even when they contradicted one another. Only very rarely did Parliament deliberately repeal them. This was not important since it was the judges rather than the executive who were responsible for administering this varied and contradictory body of laws. ... It is easy to imagine how difficult European jurists ... found it to analyse this situation.”6’ This unprincipled character was inevitable given the multi-lawyered character of ordering and organisation. Aplurality of legal and indigenous norms and institutions co-existed alongside each other - local, customary, state and informal. The inter-relationship between common law, the English civilian tradition and its courts, equity, local courts, custom, church law, arbitration, legislation, juristic science, the private law-making of lawyers and extra-legal ordering and sanctions was inevitably variegated and elaborate. The use and avoidance of the state law order might go hand-in-hand. Lawyers took advanSee, for example, L. Radzinowitz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, 5 vols., (London: Stevens, 1948-86), voL, especially Part I; S & B Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government, (London: Longmans, 1922), ch. lx—xli; J. F. Stephen, AHistory of the Criminal Law of England, (London: Macmillan, 1883), 3 vols., vol. Ill, especially chap, xxxiv. A. W. B. Simpson, “Innovation in Nineteenth Century Contract Law”, Law Quarterly Review, 91, 1975, pp. 247-78; C. H. S. Fifoot, Judge and Jurist In the Reign of Victoria, (London: Stevens, 1959). On the changes in popular political discourse, see R. Williams, Culture and Society, (London: Pelican Books, 1976), and his Keywords, (London: Fontana, 1976). Cf. E. Hobsbawn and T. Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983) on the constant remaking of "traditions”. C. Moraze. The Triumph of the Middle Classes: A Study of European Values in the 19th Century, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 94.
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