Fifty Years of the Law Commissions: The Dynamics of Law Reform

Description

This book brings together past and present law commissioners, judges, practitioners, academics and law reformers to analyse the past, present and future of the Law Commissions in the United Kingdom and beyond. Its internationally recognised authors bring a wealth of experience and insight into how and why law reform does and should take place, covering statutory and non-statutory reform from national and international perspectives. The chapters of the book developed from papers given at a conference to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Law Commissions Act 1965.

Matthew Dyson is a Fellow in Law at Trinity College, Cambridge. James Lee is Senior Lecturer in Private Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London and an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. Shona Wilson Stark is a Fellow in Law at Christ's College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.

Hart deserves to be complimented for commissioning this volume which has the potential to become a salient work of reference on law reform bodies and legal reform more generally. * Journal of the Commonwealth Lawyers' Association * This collection will appeal to a variety of readers. For those working close to the Law Commissions or other reform institutions, many of the debates within the collection will be familiar, and provide an opportunity to reflect and perhaps reconsider core aspects of the reform agenda. But the collection also reaches beyond this audience to reform-minded academics and other legal experts, providing often compelling insight into the challenges facing reformers of the law, both substantive and structural. -- J J Child * Legal Studies * ... a lively and wide-ranging examination of fifty years of law reform ... For the contribution made by the Law Commissions, the book under review provides a fitting celebration. -- Kenneth Reid * Edinburgh Law Review * [The book's] broad range of critical analysis, from both practical and academic viewpoints, repays careful study ... it definitely should find a place in every institutional law library ... It would certainly be a worthy addition to the shelves of all who are interested in the mechanics of law reform, whether they work in the sphere or are legislative drafters or have an academic appetite (its footnote references are a mine in themselves). -- Jonathan Teasdale * The Theory and Practice of Legislation * Read as a whole, the essayists give thoughtful accounts about the way the Commissions have gone about their work and how they have taken account of the constitutional arrangements that govern them. -- The Hon Justice Susan Kenny, Federal Court of Australia * Oxford Journal of Legal Studies *