Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet (3 March 1829 - 11 March 1894) was an English lawyer ,judge and anti-libertarian writer, created 1st Baronet Stephen by Queen Victoria.
Evidence Act
The Evidence Act of the same year（1972年） was entirely Stephen's own. It consolidated the rules of judicial proof, and endeavoured to connect them by legislative authority with a logical theory of probability set forth in the act itself. This part of the act has been criticized, but it is characteristic of Stephen's anxiety never to shirk a difficulty. To some extent the Contract Act may be charged with similar over-ambition; but its more practical defects are evidently due to the acceptance by the original framers of unsatisfactory statements which, coming to India with a show of authority, naturally escaped minute criticism amid the varied business of the legislative department. Besides the special work of legislation, Stephen had to attend to the current administrative business of his department, often heavy enough to occupy the whole of an ordinary able man's attention, and he took his full share in the general deliberations of the viceroy's council. His last official act was the publication of a minute on the administration of justice which pointed the way to reforms not yet fully realized, and is still most valuable for every one who wishes to understand the judicial system of British India. Stephen, mainly for family reasons, came home in the spring of 1872. During the voyage he made a pastime of meditating and writing a series of articles which took the form of his book entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873–1874)--a protest against John Stuart Mill's neoutilitarianism. Most famously he attacked the thesis of J S Mill's essay On Liberty and argued for legal compulsion, coercion and restraint in the interests of morality and religion.
Application of Indian laws
Indian experience had supplied Stephen with the motive for his next line of activity, which future historians of the common law may well regard as his most eminent title to remembrance. The government of India had been driven by the conditions of the Indian judicial system to recast a considerable part of the English law which had been informally imported. Criminal law procedure, and a good deal of commercial law, had been or were being put in a shape intelligible to civilian magistrates, and fairly within the comprehension of any intelligent man who would give a moderate amount of pains to mastering the text of the new codes. The rational substance of the law had been preserved, while the disorder and the excessive technicalities were removed. Why should not the same procedure be as practicable and profitable in England? It was Jeremy Bentham's ideal of codification, to be put in practice with the knowledge of actual business and legal habits, and the lack of which had made Bentham's plans unworkable. For the next half-dozen years Fitzjames Stephen was an ardent missionary in this cause. The mission failed for the time as to the specific undertakings in which Stephen made his experiments, but it had a large indirect success which has not yet been adequately recognized. Stephen published, by way of private exposition, digests in code form of the law of evidence and the criminal law.
著作
- General View of the Criminal Law of England (1863)
- Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873–1874)
- History of the Criminal Law of England (1883)
- The story of Nuncomar and the impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fitzjames_Stephen
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