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Attempts to Commit Crimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

J. W. Cecil Turner
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Extract

Now people in the street,’ said a learned judge in a modern case, ‘before they begin to think about it, is a very easy thing to say what amounts to an “attempt,” but when you come to analyse it, it becomes a little difficult.’

The text-books tell us a that at Common Law every attempt to commit any indictable crime, whether that ulterior crime be a felony or a misdemeanour, is itself a misdemeanour. Professor Sayre, of Harvard, in an article in the Harvard Law Review, has traced the growth of this rule which, he thinks, did not take its modern comprehensive form until a judgment of Lord Mansfield in 1784 in R. v. Scofield. Until that date there seems to have been no recognition of the doctrine that an attempt to commit any crime at all was itself a crime.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Law Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , July 1934 , pp. 230 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1934

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References

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