Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin

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Patrick Arthur Devlin, Baron Devlin, PC (25 November 1905 - 9 August 1992) was a British lawyer, judge, and jurist.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Celebrated cases 3 Later career 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Biography

Patrick Devlin was born in Chislehurst, Kent. His father was a Roman Catholic architect, originally from County Tyrone, and his mother was a Protestant, originally from Aberdeen. In 1909, a few years after Devlin's birth, the family moved to his mother's birthplace. The children were raised as Catholics, two of Devlin's sisters became nuns, and a brother became a Jesuit priest (another brother was an actor). Devlin joined the Dominican order as a novice after leaving Stonyhurst College, but left after a year for Christ's College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Devlin read both history and law, and he graduated in 1927, joining Gray's Inn and passing the bar exam in 1929. He worked as devil for William Jowitt while Jowitt was Attorney-General, and by the late 1930s he had become a successful commercial lawyer. During the Second World War he worked for various ministries of the UK Government, and in 1948 Jowitt (by then Lord Chancellor) made Devlin a High Court judge. He was 42, the second-youngest such appointment in the 20th century. Devlin was knighted later that year.

[edit] Celebrated cases

Amongst many commercial and criminal cases which Devlin tried, one of the most famous was the 1957 trial of John Bodkin Adams, an Eastbourne doctor tried for murdering two of his patients - elderly widows Edith Alice Morrell and Gertrude Hullett. He was found controversially not guilty on the former charge and even more controversially, the prosecutor - Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller - entered a nolle prosequi regarding the latter charge. Devlin later termed this "an abuse of power".^[1] Home Office pathologist Francis Camps suspected Adams of causing 163 deaths in total.^[2] In 1985, two years after the death of Adams, Devlin wrote an account of the trial, Easing the Passing.

[edit] Later career

After the Wolfenden report in 1957, Devlin argued that popular morality should be allowed to influence lawmaking, and that even private acts should be subject to legal sanction if they were held to be morally unacceptable by the "reasonable man", in order to preserve the moral fabric of society (Devlin's "reasonable man" was one who held commonly accepted views, not necessarily derived from reason as such). H. L. A. Hart supported the report's opposing view (derived from John Stuart Mill) that the law had no business interfering with private acts which harmed nobody. Devlin's argument was expanded in his 1965 book The Enforcement of Morals.

Devlin argues that a society's existence depends on the maintenance of shared political and moral values. Violation of the shared morality loosens one of the bonds which hold a society together, and thereby threatens it with disintegration. Devlin proposed a public morality that, in certain situations, would override matters of personal or private judgment.

He argued that because an attack on “society’s constitutive morality” would threaten society with disintegration, such acts could not be free from public scrutiny and sanction on the basis that they were purely private acts. In Devlin’s view, homosexual acts were a threat to society’s morality. In short, he maintained that legal intervention was essential to ensure both individual and collective survival, and to prevent social disintegration due to a loss of social cohesion.

Devlin believes that "the limits of tolerance" are reached when the feelings of the ordinary person towards a particular form of conduct reaches a certain intensity of "intolerance, indignation and disgust". If, for example, it is the genuine feeling of society that homosexuality is "a vice so abominable that its mere presence is an offence", then society may eradicate it.

“It is not possible to set theoretical limits to the power of the State to legislate against immorality. It is not possible to settle in advance exceptions to the general rule or to define inflexibly areas of morality into which the law is in no circumstances to be allowed to enter. Society is entitled by means of its laws to protect itself from dangers, whether from within or without. Here again I think that the political parallel is legitimate. The law of treason is directed against aiding the king’s enemies and against sedition from within. The justification for this is that established government is necessary for the existence of society and therefore its safety against violent overthrow must be secured. But an established morality is as necessary as good government to the welfare of society.… There are no theoretical limits against the power of the State to legislate against treason and sedition, and likewise I think there can be no theoretical limits to legislation against immorality”

In 1960 Devlin was made Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal, and the following year he became a Law Lord and life peer as Baron Devlin, of West Wick in the County of Wiltshire. He retired in 1964 when he reached the minimum age for retirement (58). It is speculated that his retirement was due in part to his increasing deafness.

After retirement, Devlin was a judge on the tribunal of the International Labour Organization until 1986. He was also chairman of the Press Council from 1964-69, and high steward of Cambridge University from 1966-91. He also spent time writing about law and history, especially the interaction of law with moral philosophy, and the importance of juries. He was active in the campaigns to reopen the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven cases.

Devlin married Madeleine Oppenheimer in 1932, and they had six children.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Review of Devlin's autobiography by Alan Watkins