ABSTRACT
Published in 1965, Australian Criminal Law was one of Australia’s first criminal law textbooks. It appeared at a moment when Australian criminal law was coming to be understood as a coherent entity, and when both law and legal education were starting to be influenced by the US as well as the UK. Colin Howard (1928-2011) was a leading figure in Australian legal academia in his time. His text offered a systematisation of Australian criminal laws which reflected the influence of Glanville Williams’ Criminal Law: The General Part (1953) and presented the criminal law for domestic students. The book is a troubling text, however, with the discussion of specific parts of the law marked by sexism and racism. The significance of the book relates to its position as a pivot between the legal treatise tradition and the modern legal textbook, its Antipodean engagement with Williams, and its coverage of codified criminal law in Australia, at a time when codification of English criminal law was a live project. Australian Criminal Law stimulated other textbook writers and marked the professional and scholarly seriousness with which Australian criminal law would be regarded henceforth. Its most important legacy relates to the codification of Commonwealth criminal law, which, like the book, was premised on the idea that criminal law is comprised of a set of principles, oriented around criminal responsibility.
