Some Notes on the Judges' Rules
| Date | 01 January 1938 |
| Published date | 01 January 1938 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3801100104 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Some Notes on the Judges' Rules.
By F. T. T.
MANY police officers say
that
they find considerable
difficulty in understanding precisely what is intended by
the Judges' Rules.
The
Rules have been in existence in their present form
since 1918, although it appears
that
in 1906
the
Chief Con-
stable of Birmingham wrote to
Lord
Alverstone,
then
Lord
Chief Justice, and invited an expression of opinion following
cases which had recently occurred in which in one case a
police officer
had
been censured by
the
Judge for having
cautioned aprisoner, and in another case an officer had been
censured for having omitted to do so.
Lord
Alverstone replied
that
"whenever
aconstable determines to make a charge
against aman he should caution him before taking any state-
ment from him. Whether there is any necessity for a caution
before a formal charge is preferred
must
depend
upon
the
particular circumstances of
the
case; no definite rule can be
laid down
".
Later, in 1912 at the request of
the
Home
Office,
the
Judges of
the
King's Bench Division drew up a Memorandum,
and in 1918this was revised and circulated to all police in
the
country.
The
Memorandum is known as
the"
Judges' Rules
".
This
is strictly amisnomer, of course, as
the
Judges have no
statutory authority to make Rules for
the
police.
The
power
to make statutory rules is vested in Parliament, and through
Parliament in the Home Secretary, and it is
the
function of the
judiciary to interpret
the
law as it stands. However, there is no
real harm in our calling these
the
"Judges' Rules ", as they
purport to express the Judicial interpretation of the somewhat
complicated case law and the rules of evidence on the subject,
and
must
be carried
out
by every police officer whose actions
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