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7 James Cook U. L. Rev. 119 (2000)
Translation

handle is hein.journals/jamcook7 and id is 119 raw text is: THE ZANARDELLI CODE AND
CODIFICATION IN THE COUNTRIES
OF THE COMMON LAW
I have derived very great assistance from this Code which is, I
believe, considered to be in many respects the most complete and
perfect Penal Code in existence.
Who wrote these words? From where is the citation taken? Of which code
was the writer speaking? The answer to these three questions will probably
surprise the reader.
Alberto Cadoppi**
The original author of the just mentioned statement was Sir Samuel Walker
Griffith, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland (Australia) in
1897:1 until this point there is nothing strange. The text from which the
citation is taken is a manual of the criminal law of Nigeria:2 also here, all
appears normal except perhaps for the emergence of a surprising connection
between the penal law of such a distant African state and that of a state in the
even more distant Australia.
What will more probably make one marvel however, is the fact that the code
of which he was speaking is the Zanardelli code! One reads in fact in the
Nigerian manual:   Griffiths hastened to recognise his own debt to the
Professor of Criminal Law, University of Parma.
The present work is the product of a study visit to Brisbane, Australia, in the months of
December 1994 and January 1995. I wish to thank for the opportunity afforded me and
the courtesies received during the course of my research by, amongst others, Robin
O'Regan Q.C., then Chairman of the Criminal Justice Commission (and before that
Chairman of the Criminal Code Review), and Aladin Rahemtula, librarian of the Supreme
Court Library in Brisbane. However the entire staff of this excellent library and of other
libraries and archives in Australia are also to be thanked as well as many other
colleagues all extraordinarily courteous and ready to help and who I had the good
fortune to meet during this unforgettable visit.
Sir S.W. Griffith, An Explanatory Letter to the Honourable the Attorney-general, in Id.,
Draft of a Code of Criminal Law prepared for the Government of Queensland, Brisbane,
1897, VII
R. Hedges, Introduction to the Criminal Law of Nigeria, (London, 1962), 4.

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