John Cyril Smith

Sir John Cyril Smith CBE QC FBA (15 January 1922 – 14 February 2003), born Barnard Castle, County Durham, was an English legal academic. Smith was an authority on English criminal law and the philosophy of criminal liability. Together with Brian Hogan he was the author of Smith & Hogan's Criminal Law, a leading undergraduate text on English criminal law. The textbook is now in its sixteenth edition (2021) and has been used as persuasive authority on crimes prosecuted in the law courts of England and Wales and elsewhere in the common law world. In 1998, Lord Bingham praised Smith; "whom most would gladly hail as the outstanding criminal lawyer of our time." Smith and Hogan's Criminal Law is now edited by Professor David Ormerod QC and Karl Laird.