ABSTRACT
Barbara Wootton has a long established reputation as an economist and social scientist; for thirty years she has served as a magistrate in one of London's busiest courts. She is, as she announces on the title page of this book, a layman so far as law is concerned notwithstanding her long service as a magistrate, but since 1959 she has devoted her versatile talents to the critical assessment of some long-venerated doctrines of English criminal law. Her three main contributions, Social Science and Social Pathology, Diminished Responsibility; a Layman's View, and the book now under review, have done much to raise the whole level in England of the discussion of the basic principles of the criminal law. Lady Wootton shows how disregard of the extraordinaiy heterogeneity of crimes has allowed stereotypes of "the criminal" and "the delinquent" to invade and obscure discussion.
