John Cyril Smith

Sir John Cyril Smith, 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, which became the leading doctrinal text on criminal law in England and Wales. The textbook 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."