Old Nick's Victorian Criminal Law Handbook¶
Victorian criminal law, arranged in the order a matter actually moves.
62 chapters across fourteen Parts, plus 15 charge lists. Press / or click the search box to search every chapter at once.
Start here¶
-
The Handbook
Ethics, police powers, bail, procedure, evidence, offences, defences, directions, sentencing and appeals.
-
Charge Lists
Every chargeable offence by subdivision, with elements, penalty, standard sentence and SORA class.
-
Currency Watch
Every chapter by the date its law was last checked, oldest first, with all currency warnings in one place.
-
Decision Gates
The 348 numbered gates that run the decision trees, indexed and searchable.
How to use this handbook¶
Arrangement. The handbook follows the sequence in which a criminal matter actually moves: practice foundations and currency, police powers, bail, jurisdiction and capacity, pre-trial procedure, evidence, substantive offences, family violence, inchoate liability and complicity, defences, trial and jury directions, sentencing, post-sentence orders, and appeals. Within Part VI the numbered Evidence series is preserved in its established order, 0 through 16.
Chapters. Each chapter reproduces one source sheet in full. Nothing has been abridged. Headings have been mapped onto a single hierarchy — Part, Chapter, Section, Sub-section — so that the table of contents and the Word navigation pane work across the whole volume, and the typography has been normalised to a single face and size.
Currency. Each chapter carries its own currency line immediately beneath its title, in the grey source note. Those dates differ between chapters and none of them has been altered. Chapter 2 (Currency and Automatic-Fail Watch) collects the points on which an out-of-date answer fails; read it against the individual chapter notes before relying on any proposition.
Updating the contents table. The table of contents is a live Word field. It should update itself when the document opens. If the page numbers look wrong, select the whole document (Ctrl+A) and press F9, then choose to update the entire table.
Provenance. The appendix at the end lists every source document, its chapter number and the date it was last modified, so that any chapter can be traced back to the file it came from.
Amending a chapter
Click the pencil at the top right of any chapter to edit it in the browser. Save, and the site rebuilds itself in under a minute. Every edit is kept in version history, so nothing is ever lost.