Codification, the Law Commissions and Law Reform

In one line

Indian law was made a code rather than a heap by four Law Commissions between 1834 and 1879, and the work of keeping it in repair was given after independence to a permanent, non-statutory Law Commission of India that has now reported more than two hundred and seventy times.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: section 53 of the Charter Act 1833 empowered the Governor-General in Council to appoint an Indian Law Commission to inquire into the jurisdiction, powers and rules of the existing courts and police establishments and into the nature and operation of all laws prevailing in any part of British India and to report on them; four Law Commissions were appointed in the British period, in 1834 under Lord Macaulay, in 1853, in 1861 and in 1879, and from their work came the Indian Penal Code, the Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure, the Indian Contract Act, the Indian Evidence Act, the Indian Succession Act and the Transfer of Property Act; and after independence the Central Government constituted the First Law Commission of India in 1955 with the Attorney-General, M. C. Setalvad, as its chairman, since when twenty-two Law Commissions have been appointed, each a non-statutory body with a three-year term and a definite terms of reference.

What codification is, and why India needed it

To codify is to reduce the law on a subject to a systematic written statement enacted as a whole. A code is not merely a statute; it is a statute that means to be complete on its subject, so that a court looks first at the code and not behind it.

The condition it answers is the condition British India was in. As the Law Commission's own account of the first Commission's task puts it, India had several systems of law "widely differing from each other but co-existing and co-equal", and what they lacked was completeness, uniformity and certainty.

Count the systems this book has already described. English common law and equity in the Presidency Towns under the charters. Hindu law and Muslim law in personal matters under Hastings's plan of 1772. The Regulations of the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Governments in the mofussil. "Justice, equity and good conscience" where no rule reached. Acts of the British Parliament for India, and, after 1833, Acts of the Indian legislature. A litigant could not know which of those applied to him, and often nobody could.

Macaulay stated the object of codification in a sentence a student should be able to reproduce: "uniformity when you can have it; diversity when you must have it; but in all cases, certainty."

So the answer to "why is codification essential?" has three parts: