ABSTRACT
The idea of property has, from times immemorial, occupied the minds of social and legal philosophers and reformers. Economists, sociologists and psychologists have pondered over its problems ever since these branches of human knowledge came into existence. One might have expected that the subject should have received similar attention on the part of criminal lawyers and the makers of penal legislation. At least, for the past hundred years, with the coming of a more scientifically minded age, one should have thought that the law of theft and those other inventions of the legal mind which aim at the protection of property should have been developed in close contact with the evolution of economic and sociological thought. In fact, very little of this kind has happened. If the law of sexual crime is sometimes called mediaeval, that of economic crime has, to a considerable extent, remained archaic. In the survey of the “History of the Law relating to Theft and similar Offences” in which that great judge and scholar, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, traces the development of the subject in his country before the passing of the Larceny Act of 1916, 1 the following adjectives occur, without a single word of praise interspersed among all this condemnation: “strange” absurd “peculiar” intricate “unsatisfactory” inconsistent “unintelligible” capricious “a mere incumbrance and source of intricacy and confusion”
