Constitutionalism in Mexico, indeed in Latin America generally, has always posed a problem for interpreters, especially for Anglo-American interpreters. It is true that adherence to a written constitution and to constitutional order has been central to Mexican political liberalism since independence. As a state-building philosophy, liberalism has functioned both as an ideology, in combat with inherited colonial and Hispanic patterns of government, and as an all-embracing myth serving to unify contending self-defined liberal factions. In both instances, liberals fought for, debated, and on occasion were able to implement basic Western constitutional principles, namely, the preservation of individual liberty and legal equality within a representative government whose powers were set out and limited in the articles of a written document. The problem of interpretation arises because of a widespread view that constitutional government in Mexico has been ineffective or, at best, that the struggle to achieve it has been arduous.

Historians and legal theorists have suggested a range of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory reasons to explain why judges, prosecutors, and other officials of the German administration of justice proved willing both to persecute the various enemies of the Nazi state and to tolerate the many extralegal murders and lesser brutalities of other organs of the regime. One line of interpretation, dominant until the late 1960s, stressed the importance of the tradition of legal positivism. Believing themselves bound to the letter of the law, courts and prosecutors obeyed politically and racially repressive laws without asking moral questions. An alternative and opposing explanation emphasizes instead the justice administration's willingness to stretch the letter of the law to conform to “spontaneous popular sentiments of right.”

The punishment prescribed by English law for murder in the first half of the twentieth century was death. A judge had to pronounce this sentence upon a person convicted of murder, except in two special classes of cases: persons under eighteen years of age at the time of the offense and pregnant women. He had no discretion to impose any less severe sentence. While retribution survived only in a symbolic form elsewhere in the criminal law, capital punishment, as Oxford criminologist Max Grunhut maintained, was a “powerful relic of retaliation in kind.” The law still reflected the ancient concept that every murderer forfeits his life becauce he has taken another's life: “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.”

In eighteenth-century England the rule of law was “the central legitimizing ideology, displacing the religious authority and sanctions of previous centuries.” Arising out of struggles between the monarchy, Parliament, and the courts, the rule of law sought to protect individual liberty and private property by placing constraints on arbitrary authority. The ruling class used the rule of law ideology to enhance their power, but it also acted as a check on that power. All citizens from the monarch to the poorest citizen became bound by the rule of law and could settle their disputes in the courts presided over by judges, who were independent of manipulation.

Sir Henry Maine, the eminent Victorian jurist, once remarked, in frustration at being unable to secure his desired reforms of the Indian criminal law, that no one cared about the penal code except theorists and habitual criminals. This has been the recurrent lament of the English criminal lawyer. Repeated initiatives in the field of codification over the last 150 years have enjoyed little popular support or understanding, and as the most recent project stumbles forward into its fourth decade, an air of fatalism surrounds the entire question of the code. There are calls for a new political initiative to revive the project, and there have been more modest appeals for a reexamination of the principles of existing penal legislation, though neither seems likely to provoke much response. Yet, for all of the recent discussion of codes and codification, the question of the significance of codification to the modern law remains something of an enigma.

Lindsay Farmer's argument that, in seeking to replace the common law with legislation, and in striving for a novel systematization of the relationship between civil and penal law, the criminal law commissioners of 1833-45 transformed the understanding of criminal law in relation to government is a powerful one. It is to some degree an inferential argument, positing that a reading of Bentham's theory of legislation allows us to understand the commissioners' work better, since Bentham “makes explicit many of the broader political assumptions that guided the commissioners and allows us to understand the precise nature of their codification project.” It is worth asking therefore how far the commissioners were informed by Benthamic ideas and what they understood their task to be.

Students of Anglo-American criminal law, historians included, have traditionally had very little to say about criminal codes. This omission is startling in the face of ongoing efforts to codify criminal law since the late eighteenth century, not only in England and the United States, but also in Canada and India. The only historical study of criminal codification in the United States is a survey article that is, strictly speaking, not about codification at all, but about the great men who made codification possible, in particular the forefathers of Herbert Wechsler, the main drafter of the Model Penal Code. The Model Penal Code itself gave no clues as to its historical antecedents, if any. It is regarded, and portrayed itself, as having invented the wheel by starting from scratch, the raw material of the common law.

The words of Henry Bellenden Ker, Law Commissioner, quoted as the title of this response, were truer than he knew. In protesting that the commissioners' project was less radical than was alleged by the opponents of codification, he sought principally to gain parliamentary time and space for consideration of the commissioners' work. However, his words contain a deeper vein of truth. The work of the law commissioners has been praised and criticized, celebrated and ignored, over the past one hundred and fifty years, but never yet properly understood. Even as the commissioners' reports have been plundered by successive generations of legal scholars in search of doctrinal and theoretical support for their own very contemporary concerns, there has been a continuing neglect of the commissioners' overall project and little attempt to link it to the significant transformations in punishment and the administration of criminal justice that were occurring in the same period. Accordingly, any reassessment of the commissioners' work should address these two issues: understanding their project as a whole and placing codification within the general historical context of the modernizing of the state and institutions of criminal justice. It is these two concerns that the commentators address in their responses.

Legal education has always responded to, perhaps even been driven by, available technologies of information dissemination. At the start of the twenty-first century law teachers find themselves in an unprecedented period of technological change: available means of presenting and distributing information are daily transforming. The “information age” seems, genuinely, to be upon us. The present is difficult to comprehend, the future beyond imagination.