Abstract
The criminal law of assault has developed in a piecemeal manner. It is a mixture of early common law (common law assault being derived from the medieval writ of trespass), statute (mainly nineteenth century), and more recent case law. The results can often appear illogical both in content and terminology, and the whole area, including sexual assaults, is ready for reform, as a recent report of the Law Commission has indicated (see Section 19.4). In this chapter we will examine the most important non-sexual assaults. Rape and indecent assault will be discussed in the next chapter.
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Bibliography and Further Reading
Criminal Law Revision Committee: 14th Report, Offences Against the Person (1980, Cmnd 7844).
Gardner: Rationality and the Rule of Law in Offences Against the Person, [1994] Cambridge Law Journal, 502.
Hogan: Non-Fatal Offences, [1980] Criminal Law Review, 542.
Horder: Rethinking Non-Fatal Offences against the Person, (1994) 14 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 335.
Horder: A Critique of the Correspondence Principle in Criminal Law, [1995] Criminal Law Review, 759.
Shute: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed…, [1996] Criminal Law Review, 684.
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© 1998 Marise Cremona and Jonathan Herring
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Herring, J., Cremona, M. (1998). Assaults. In: Criminal Law. Macmillan Law Masters. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13561-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13561-5_7
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