Enforcing the Black-Out
| Date | 01 April 1940 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X4001300205 |
| Author | C. R. Hewitt |
| Published date | 01 April 1940 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Enforcing the Black-out
By
CHIEF
INSPECTOR
C. R.
HEWITT
City of
London
Police
THE"
black-out"
law may now be presumed to have
settled down for a time.
The
way of its growth, the
sweeping prohibitions followed by a rapid accumulation of
" relaxations " announced by Ministers of the Crown, might
be thought a novel way of forcing the public to fulfil its
democratic duty by making its own laws;
but
in fact it was
very much like the making of the common law itself, except
that it packed the centuries of trial and error into about five
irksome months, substituting the temper of public opinion
for the historical researches of His Majesty's Judges.
Thus
there is now some hope that, in discussing the more general
provisions of the Lighting (Restrictions) Order, 1940, one's
words may not be written in sand.
Probably no examination of this far-reaching Order from
the Police point of view could be achieved without appearing
to criticise the way in which it is drafted.
This
follows from
the fact that all the offences created by the Order must in due
course be described in summonses addressed to defendants.
It
is true that asummons is declared by section 32 (I) of the
Criminal Justice Act, 1925, to be " sufficient" if it contains
" a statement of the specific offence with which the accused
person is charged," and
that
by section 32 (2) it must describe
the offence shortly in ordinary language;
but
this is probably
the most consistently disregarded clause in all the statutes
controlling courts of summary jurisdiction, the courts having
found that excursions into "ordinary
language"
are beset
with traps for the drafter of summonses, and result too often
in
the failure of ordinary language to represent statutory
passages which are the reverse of ordinary. Seeking safety in
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