ABSTRACT
Criminal law should be certain, consistent and accessible. There is now widespread concern that the law satisfies none of these criteria. This is due in large measure to judicial law-making, a lack of general agreement as to the purpose of criminal law and inadequate machinery for law reform. Codification of the law would largely meet these problems and the Law Commission published a proposed codification in 1989. The proposal had been preceded by widespread consultation with all those professionally involved in the criminal law. However, parliament has failed to allocate time in order to consider codification and as a result the Law Commission has published a series of ‘mini-Codes’ in the belief that they will be more appealing to politicians. Unfortunately, this tactic has also failed and proposals for law reform were largely ignored during the 1990s.
