ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century efforts to codify the criminal law of England and Wales, culminating in James Fitzjames Stephens draft English Code, 187880, are surveyed. In 1968 it announced its objective of a programme of comprehensive examination of the law that would lead to codification of the criminal law. The codification project was removed from its programme 19 Law Commission for England and Wales, Tenth Programme of Law Reform. The Law Commission is currently reviewing the insanity defence as part of its latest programme of law reform. This is incoherent because the focus of the two schemes is quite different: with inchoate liability the emphasis is on protecting against threatened harms; with secondary participation the focus is on the defendant's liability in playing a role in the resulting harm. It appears that, prima facie, there have only been fairly minimalist reforms of aspects of the General Part of the criminal law of England and Wales over the past decade.
