Reports of Committees

TEE Russell Committee Report did not make the headlines when it was published in July 1966, but it recommends some useful, if qualified and inadequate, reforms of a very unsatisfactory part of the law of England and Wales and of Scotland. This is the discrimination exercised by the law against those innocent people unfortunate enough to have been born outside marriage. Much of the inadequacy of the recommendations arises from the Committee's narrow terms of reference, viz., the right of succession to property on death.2 The committee of six men and three women, under the chairmanship of Sir Charles Russell, a Lord Justice of Appeal, included also a Scottish judge and another Scottish lawyer. The influence of lawyers emerges in the Report in an eminently clear and succinct statement of the present law and in moderate and wellargued proposals for reform. It is manifest also in an insistence on ancient terms which have now acquired in common speech a purely pejorative meaning on a method of proof which the Committee itself agrees 4 will greatly reduce the effect of its proposals as regards 1 Cmnd. 3061. * The Committee, which was appointed in February 1964 by the then Lord Chancellor of England and the Secretary of State for Scotland. was asked '* to consider whether any alterations are desirable in the law of succession in England and Wales and in Scotland in relation to illegitimate persons." 8 Words may not break bones, but they can deeplq'wound thq,spirit. especially if a young child is told that an abusive yord is correctly applied to him. Although the term " illegitimate persons was used in its terms : f reference, the Russell Committee explains in para. 8 of its Report that Partly for the sake of brevity, and partly to avoid confusion in eye or ear between legitimate and illegitimatg, we refer to an illegitimate person as

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