DEVLIN AND HART

Patrick Devlin and HLA Hart

[Name of the Institute]

Patrick Devlin and HLA Hart

Introduction

In this paper I pledged to dedicate a comment to a discussion that took place in the middle of last century between Lord Devlin and HLA Hart about whether law is or not an instrument for imposing coercive of morality. After all there is always a legal norm and moral position as he who is in favor or against euthanasia seeks to impose its moral proposals criminal, who is in favor of equality aims to do the same through a progressive tax system.

Patrick Devlin

Devlin (1905-1992), son of an architect, enjoyed debating at Stonyhurst and Christ's College, Cambridge. He flourished as an arbitrator and was the first non-journalist to be chairman of the Press Council. His informal manner and sense of humour in these spheres was appreciated. Justice, 'the root of which is the love of an order that moves the universe' was, for him, the highest value. He wrote about it in Trial by Jury (1956), Samples of Lawmaking (1962), and The Enforcement of Morals (1965). The power of juries to decide questions of fact and of guilt or innocence in criminal trials should be respected. This led him to join with Lord Scarman and others in pressing for a review of the convictions in the Luton post office case (1969) and that of the Guildford four (1975) (Schulte, 1986, pp. 121-124). In the end, though in the Guildford case only in 1989, the campaigns were successful.

On morality he clashed with HLA Hart in a famous controversy in which Devlin defended a more conservative, Hart a more libertarian, view about the right of a community to enforce strongly held moral opinions. At the end he returned to the rites of the Catholic church of his youth. His fascinating autobiography, Taken at the Flood, was published posthumously. Of the small number of twentieth-century English judges who addressed a wider public, his rigorous conscience, clarity, and eloquence made him the most impressive writer.

Patrick Devlin used an argument for taxes which was in favour of assimilating sin and crime to penalize homosexuality. In fact Lord Devlin felt that every society is a community of ideas about good and bad, that is, a moral community and that without that common ethical acquits, every society would disintegrate. As the primary role of governments is to ensure the survival of society, every government should be able to use the law to reinforce the ideas that unite the group, just as it used to impose any other factor for the survival of society as such. If any company is authorized to defend themselves by laws against crimes of treason or sedition because such acts affect its stability, then you may object to moral deviation if that affects the values the cemented. Remove vice, therefore, is a state function and if the authorities find that a behavioural repulsion, disgust or revulsion are authorized to suppress criminal regardless of whether such conduct has or not ...