Macaulay's IPC - a success at home, overlooked abroad

Abstract

Macaulay’s Penal Code has been a remarkable success. It has endured in India and several other countries in the region for over a century and a half. But it has had few imitators. Unlike Sir Samuel Griffith’s Criminal Code for Queensland, for example, it has not spread around the world. This paper looks at three opportunities to use the Code as a resource for further law reform that were allowed to pass by – in New South Wales, Tasmania and Germany. In each of these jurisdictions, attention was drawn to the Code, but there was no follow-up. The principal explanation for the lack of enthusiasm for borrowing from this most successful Code is that Macaulay’s drafting style was far ahead of his time. But, despite the lack of detailed borrowing from the Indian Penal Code, the fact that codification had been successful in India did give some confidence to those proposing codes elsewhere.