Review: Blackstone's Guide to the Criminal Justice Act 2003
| Author | Paul Roberts |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.9.2.148.64807 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
148 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE & PROOF
REVIEWS
Richard Taylor, Martin Wasik and Roger Leng
BLACKSTONE’S GUIDE TO THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT 2003
Oxford University Press (2004), xxxiv + 685pp, pb £34.95
Many readers will already be familiar with Blackstone’s Guides to new legislation,
now published by OUP, but retaining the old Black stone Press imprint. Criminal
practitioners and law lecturers alike have over the course of almost two decades
been greatly assisted in finding their way around recently enacted legislation by
these concise and astute commentaries, which typically appear on the bookshelves
with improbable speed and yet maintain an impressive standard of informational
content and critical analysis. The pack of authors is frequently shuffled in order to
match legislative subject-matter to commentators’ particular expertise (for example,
D. Birch and R. Leng, Blackstone’s Guide to the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act
1999 (Blackstone Press: 2000); R. Leng, R. Taylor and M. Wasik, Blackstone’s Guide to the
Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (Blackstone Press: 1998); T. Lawson-Cruttenden and N.
Addison, Blackstone’s Guide to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 (Blackstone Press:
1997)), but in the overlapping fields of criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal
justice, Richard Taylor, Martin Wasik and Roger Leng are the anchormen of the
series. In attempting to make sense of the labyrinthine text of the Criminal Justice
Act 2003 they have taken on their sternest challenge to date.
In the words of the authors’ Preface, ‘The Criminal Justice Act 2003 is the longest
Act any of us has had to grapple with, weighing in at 339 sections, 38 Schedules
and over 450 pages in the Stationery Office version. Trying to be positive about it,
the best one might say is that it is good in parts. It is so wide ranging that it is
difficult to identify a coherent theme’ (p. xi). The length and complexity of the
2003 Act doubtless explain why on this occasion publication was not quite as
prompt as previous commentaries have been: the Act received Royal Assent on 20
November 2003, but the Guide did not appear until October 2004. Yet a slightly
longer lead-in time hardly matters in this instance, because very little of the Act
was actually brought into force immediately, and large and important chunks of
it still remain unimplemented. Even after full implementation, moreover,
commentaries will still be useful in getting to grips with—and perhaps even
influencing, not least through counsel’s arguments—the first phases of judicial
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE & PROOF (2005) 9 E&P 148–154
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