Bulk and Complexity
In 1980, a Committee of JUSTICE said that, upon conducting a search, they found over 7,200 offences, and that they thought that there were probably many more. They said that "it is now impossible to ascertain the entire content of the criminal law at any given time". In 1989, the Law Commission said that a hypothetical criminal code that contained all existing criminal offences would be "impossibly bulky". In 2001, Peter Glazebrook said the criminal law was "voluminous, chaotic and contradictory". In March 2011, there were more than ten thousand offences excluding those created by by-laws.
Read more about this topic: English Criminal Law
Famous quotes containing the words bulk and/or complexity:
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is not only their own need to mother that takes some women by surprise; there is also the shock of discovering the complexity of alternative child-care arrangements that have been made to sound so simple. Those for whom the intended solution is equal parenting have found that some parents are more equal than others.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)