50 Years' On

Today is the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Race Relations Act 1968. The Act was passed to strengthen the less developed protection in the 1965 Act, which was itself born out of the Labour Party's enthusiasm for the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. Neither the 1965 or 1968 Acts, however, were the first example of British jurisprudence addressing questions of race.

That distinction fell to a statute probably forgotten by most of us - the Hotel Proprietors Act 1956. Whilst the common law generally was slower than Parliament to address the iniquities of discrimination (as witness the restrictive interpretation of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 in Vicontess Rhondda's Claim [1922] 2 AC 339, there was an exception - Birkett J's (as he then was) decision in Constantine v Imperial Hotels Group [1944] KB 693. Whislt it is tempting to explain away Birkett J's decsion on the basis of that special reverence for cricket found in the common law, I would like to think it (also) shows that creative judging is just as much part of the genius of the common law as creative lawyering. And I'd like to think, too, that in another 50 years students of law and history will need footnotes to explain to them why, in the second decade of the 21st century, we still needed statutory protection from discrimination. But I doubt it...