Who dares wins…unless it’s a draw. John Cooper QC reflects on the battle for compulsory courtroom reading
There has probably been no other controversy like it in recent years.
Clearly not in the category of the great Brexit debate, the annual head-to-head between Blackstone’s Criminal Practice and Archbold has become even more acute since the judicial powers that be decided that both were acceptable texts in the crown court and that neither should have precedence over the other; a sort of revocation of Art 50 granting a reprieve for Archbold, which hitherto had been the only acknowledged text, no doubt on the principle that when a small panel of judges decided that Blackstone’s should replace Archbold as the standard crown court text, they might not have had all the information in front of them that they needed.
That information was the dismay with which such a unilateral decision was taken, without consultation and by a small group of judges. Since then, both the Law Society and the Criminal Bar Association have expressed
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