ABSTRACT
The 1966 Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, chaired by Lord Beeching, and its progeny, the Crown Court, established nationwide in 1972, are said to have accomplished one of the most profound changes ever in the history of criminal justice in England and Wales. By 1967, at the time the Royal Commission began receiving evidence, there were 58 Courts of County Quarter Sessions and 93 Borough and City Courts in England and Wales. The Courts Act 1971 did indeed scrap the ancient patchwork of Assizes and Quarter Sessions; replace it with a unitary criminal court under central government supervision. The Act reformed and ‘modernised’ legal institutions in a manner so sweeping that it is reminiscent of the project to rationalise the criminal and civil law that had been launched as part of the great state-building enterprise of the 1820s and 1830s.
