''A Treatise of Pleas of the Crown; or, a system of the principal matters relating to that subject, digested under proper heads'' (or ''Pleas of the Crown'' for short), is an influential treatise on the
criminal law
Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It proscribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and Well-being, welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal l ...
of England, written by
William Hawkins,
serjeant-at-law, and later edited by John Curwood,
barrister
A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdiction (area), jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include arguing cases in courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, jurisprud ...
. It was first published in 1716 and went through eight editions, the last of which was published in 1824.
It is often cited as "Hawk.P.C." or some similar variation on this.
In 1847, John Gage Marvin said:
In 1925, Percy Henry Winfield said: "In his preface, Hawkins, after a panegyric on the existing criminal law which staggers any modern lawyer accustomed to something less brutal, points out the imperfections of previous attempts to expound it, and states his own object to be the reduction of all the laws relating to it under one scheme. His first book deals with crimes, his second with the manner of bringing criminals to punishment. The work, as a whole, is very comprehensive, and, for a book of that period, well arranged. It shows plenty of critical ability, and in general it is a reliable statement of the law as Hawkins knew it. On historical points, it occasionally requires verification, and in the editions, which we have used, it is often overloaded with marginal references, some of which are untraceable and others worthless; but it may be that these are due to later editors. Hawkins’s work is deservedly of high authority and is still cited. It was the starting-point of modern laborious treatises on the criminal law which are valuable as digests of the subject, but which make no advance on Hawkins’s plan or style, and are not invariably reliable on matters of history."
[Winfield, Chief Sources of English Legal History, 1925, pp 325 & 326.]
See also
*
Books of authority
Books of authority is a term used by legal writers to refer to a number of early legal textbooks that are excepted from the rule that textbooks (and all books other than statute or law report) are not treated as authorities by the courts of England ...
References
*Percy Henry Winfield. The Chief Sources of English Legal History. 1925. Pages 254
325and 326.
*Bishop. New Commentaries on the Criminal Law. 1892. Volume 1
Page 46
*5 The American Law Revie
629*6 The British Criti
128*Simpson. Legal Theory and Legal History: Essays on the Common Law. Page
294and 295.
*Owen Hood Phillips. "Hale and Hawkins". A First Book of English Law
Fourth Edition 1960. Page 200.
*Dubber. Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law. Page
62to 64.
*Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise
Page 148
External links
* Eighth edition of this book (1824) from
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...
:
** Volume 1 (''Of criminal offences''
** Volume 2 (''Of courts of criminal jurisdiction and the modes of proceeding therein''
Wythepedia
{{DEFAULTSORT:Treatise of Pleas of the Crown
1716 non-fiction books
1716 in law
1716 in England
English criminal law
Legal treatises