ABSTRACT
Under English law, does boxing necessarily involve the commission of a criminal offence? Since the 1890s, no boxer has been prosecuted for merely being involved in a boxing match. In the occasional, indirect references to the legal status of the sport, which have occurred largely in the context of consent to non-fatal offences against the person, it is clear that the courts hold boxing to be legal or, in any event, that any change in that status is primarily a matter for the legislature. In that context, a prosecution against a boxer would be seen as serving little purpose in that it would merely ‘scapegoat’ the individual boxer for the illegality of the sport as a whole; thus it is likely to have little attraction for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Nevertheless, despite that understandable reticence, it is argued that, on closer analysis, boxing is vulnerable to various and serious assault-based criminal charges. That broad contention prompts a number of specific questions, which in turn form the structural framework of this chapter.1 In punching an opponent during the course of a bout, is a boxer committing an assault? If a boxing match results in the death of a participant, could the surviving boxer be vulnerable to a charge of (involuntary) manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act? Does a boxer have the necessary ‘guilty mind’ for the commission of a criminal (assault-based) offence? Is consent always an applicable defence? Can a boxer really be taken to ‘consent’ to injury? Should there be a separate (non-consensual) defence of ‘lawful activity’?
