Creation of a uniform legal code in family law, criminal law, etc in Ireland?

I've just finished the quite superb The Secret Barrister (https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Secret-Barrister-Audiobook/B07B3RZDGV), written by a barrister in England who specialises in criminal law. At the end - when proposing alternatives to the current chaos of numerous laws, amendments and so forth strewn across centuries of legislation and in obscure parts of other legislation written in esoteric, verbose and archaic language - he notes that in 1998 a Justice Bingham, who was head of their Supreme Court, proposed the replacement of all of the above by a uniform code for criminal law such as exists in Canada.

Is there any chance of Ireland creating a similar uniform code of law for all the types of law: criminal; family; commercial, etc? The advantages seem enormous, and like a revolutionary opening up of legal knowledge to the public.

PS: Anybody in the Irish legal system open to writing a similar book about what's going on here? One from a family law specialist in Irish courts would be very enlightening.

Peregrinus

I don't think there's any modern jurisdiction that has one all-embracing code covering every aspect of law. At most, there are countries that have a criminal code, a family code, a civil code, a commercial code, etc. There are always borders and overlaps between these codes — is the crime of tax evation to be dealt with in the criminal code or the tax code? If a company is trading while insolvent, are the civil and criminal consequences of this tob e addressed in two different codes? Are inheritance rights an aspect of family law or of the law of property? Etc. Plus, some of these countries also have areas of law that remain uncodified.

I think you're overselling the advantages a bit. France, Italy, etc have codified legal systems of this kind; most European countries do. But citizens of those countries still need lawyers to advise then on the interpretation of the codes, and on their application to the citizens' individual circumstances. The codes themselves are huge, so even learning how to navigate them, and learning how the different part of them fit together, and so learning where to look for the answers to particular questions, is a big deal.

In common law jurisdictions such as Ireland, where judicial decisions create precedents that other courts will later follow, codification will never be a complete statement of the law anyway. From time to time all the statutes relating to a particular subject matter are consolidated into a single document, which is then enacted by the Oireachtas, with the earlier statues being repealed; that's a close to codification as we get — for example, the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, which restated the law on income tax, corporation tax and capital gains tax, and repealed all earlier legislation on the subject. There has been further tax legislation since then, but mostly by way of amendment to the 1997 Act, so if you get an up-to-date copy of the 1997 Act, incorporating all amendments, that's pretty close to a tax code. But a tax adviser still needs to know how the courts and tribunals have interpreted the provisions of the tax code and applied them in different circumstances.

In Ireland the codification of the criminal law has been partly undertaken. For example, the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act, 2001 consolidated the law relating to dishonesty and fraud; the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994 deals with public order offences; and so on. And there was a draft code prepared about ten years ago that would have drawn all these together into a single criminal code, though that was never enacted into law.