Anderton v Ryan [1985] is a House of Lords case in English criminal law (in the highest court of the land at the time), on whether an act which would amount to an offence but which by virtue of a misunderstanding of the goods involved was impossible (nonetheless a fully believed offence by the perpetrator at the time, specifically of purchasing posited stolen goods) breaks section 1 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981; the court established against a similar defendant the next year that the reverse should hold true in future (per R v Shivpuri).

A woman purchased a video cassette recorder (VCR) on the belief that it was stolen.

While they were investigating the burglary, she confessed to having purchased the VCR she believed to be stolen.

The House of Lords decided that impossibility was not within the scope of the offence under s. 1(2) of the Criminal Attempts Act (nor any other residual offence from earlier legal precedents).

The case R v Shivpuri overruled the decision a year later and represents an example of the House of Lords Judicial Committee overruling its jurisprudence[2] under the Practice Statement 1966.