United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches

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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches >> Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales:: Law Reform Now in 21st Century Britain: Brexit and Beyond [2017] UKSpeech F7GC2 (27 June 2017)
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Cite as: [2017] UKSpeech F7GC2

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Speech by the Lord Chief Justice: Law Reform Now in 21st Century Britain - Brexit and Beyond

27 June 2017

I have taken as the first part of the title of this lecture words with which Lord Scarman would have been very familiar: Law Reform Now - the three words which formed the title of the Gerald Gardiner and Andrew Martin book which contained their blueprint for what would become the Law Commission. As Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC, in the course of tracing the origins and huge success of the Law Commission in his 2015 Scarman Lecture, recalled, it started with a proposition; one they took to be axiomatic: ". . . that much of our English law is out of date, and some of it shockingly so." They were not wrong.

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