Maurer School of Law: Indiana University Digital Repository @ Maurer Law Addison Harris Lecture Lectures 1975 The Awful Statute Book of Great Britain Noel Hutton First Parliamentary Counsel Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/harris Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, and the Legislation Commons Recommended Citation Hutton, Noel, "The Awful Statute Book of Great Britain" (1975). Addison Harris Lecture. 6. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/harris/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Lectures at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Addison Harris Lecture by an authorized administrator of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE AWFUL STATUTE BOOK OF GREAT BRITAIN* Sir Noel Hutton** The Statutes of the United Kingdom have never been the object of much admiration, at all events in the United Kingdom it- self. One of my predecessors, as First Parliamentary Counsel, Sir William Graham Harrison, writing in 19351 said that they resembled the early Christians in Rome: "As for this sect, we know that everywhere it is spoken against." More recent- ly Lord Gardiner, who was Lord Chancellor in the Labour Administration of 1964-70 and in that capacity initiated or participated in a number of changes (always referred to honoris causa as "reforms"), addressed the University of Durham on the subject of the Role of the Lord Chancellor in the field of Law Reform. 2 His address listed the things which the new Law Commission, set up by Act of Parliament in 1965, had done, were doing and had yet to do.