Lord Devlin
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Patrick Arthur Devlin, Baron Devlin, PC, FBA (25 November 1905 – 9 August 1992) was a British judge and legal philosopher. The second-youngest English High Court judge in the 20th century, he served as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary from 1960 to 1964. In 1959, Devlin headed the Devlin Commission, which reported on the State of Emergency declared by the colonial governor of
Nyasaland Nyasaland () was a British protectorate located in Africa that was established in 1907 when the former British Central Africa Protectorate changed its name. Between 1953 and 1963, Nyasaland was part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasala ...
. In 1985 he became the first British judge to write a book about a case he had presided over, the 1957 trial of suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams.Devlin, Patrick; "Easing the Passing", London, The Bodley Head, 1985 Devlin was involved in the debate about homosexuality in British law; in response to the
Wolfenden report The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Sir John Wolfenden, the chairman of the committee) was published in the United Kingdom on 4 September 1957 after a suc ...
, he argued, contrary to
H. L. A. Hart Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (18 July 190719 December 1992), known simply as H. L. A. Hart, was an English legal philosopher. He was Professor of Jurisprudence (University of Oxford), Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University an ...
, that a common public morality should be upheld. Devlin's daughter Clare, then aged 81, said in 2021 that her father had sexually abused her from the age of 7 until her teens.


Early life and education

Patrick Devlin was born in Chislehurst, Kent. His father was an Irish Roman Catholic architect whose own father came from
County Tyrone County Tyrone (; ) is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the thirty-two traditional counties of Ireland. It is no longer used as an administrative division for local government but retai ...
, and his mother was a Scottish Protestant, originally from
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. 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; one brother was the actor William Devlin and another became a Jesuit priest. Devlin joined the
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as a
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after leaving Stonyhurst College, but left after a year for Christ's College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, Devlin read both History and Law, and was elected
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of
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in 1926. He graduated in 1927, having obtained a Lower Second for both parts of his degree.


Legal and judicial career

He joined
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in 1927, passing the bar exam in 1929. He worked as
devil A devil is the personification of evil as it is conceived in various cultures and religious traditions. It is seen as the objectification of a hostile and destructive force. Jeffrey Burton Russell states that the different conceptions of ...
for William Jowitt while Jowitt was
Attorney-General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
, and by the late 1930s had a successful commercial practice. During the Second World War he worked for several government ministries. He
took silk In the United Kingdom and in some Commonwealth countries, a King's Counsel (post-nominal initials KC) during the reign of a king, or Queen's Counsel (post-nominal initials QC) during the reign of a queen, is a lawyer (usually a barrister or a ...
in 1939 and was Attorney-General of the Duchy of Cornwall between 1947 and 1948.


High Court judge

In 1948, Jowitt (by then
Lord Chancellor The lord chancellor, formally the lord high chancellor of Great Britain, is the highest-ranking traditional minister among the Great Officers of State in Scotland and England in the United Kingdom, nominally outranking the prime minister. Th ...
) made Devlin, then aged 42, a High Court judge, assigned to the
King's Bench Division The King's Bench Division (or Queen's Bench Division when the monarch is female) of the High Court of Justice deals with a wide range of common law cases and has supervisory responsibility over certain lower courts. It hears appeals on point ...
; he received the customary
knighthood A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the Pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the ...
later that year. He was the second-youngest person to be appointed to the High Court bench in the 20th century. From 1956 to 1960 he also served as the first President of the
Restrictive Practices Court The Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956 was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom intended to enforce competition, and provide an appropriate check on restrictive combines and practices. It required that any agreement between companies ...
.


Trial of John Bodkin Adams

Amongst many commercial and criminal cases that Devlin tried, perhaps his most famous case was the 1957 trial of John Bodkin Adams, an
Eastbourne Eastbourne () is a town and seaside resort in East Sussex, on the south coast of England, east of Brighton and south of London. Eastbourne is immediately east of Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Great Britain and part of the la ...
doctor indicted for murdering two of his patients
Edith Alice Morrell Edith Alice Morrell (20 June 1869 – 13 November 1950) was a resident of Eastbourne, East Sussex, England, and patient of Dr John Bodkin Adams. Although Adams was acquitted in 1957 of her murder, the question of Adams' role in Morrell's death ...
an elderly widow and Gertrude Hullett, a middle-aged woman whose husband had died four months before her death. Although the
Attorney-General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
's decision to charge Adams with the murder of Morrell, whose body had been cremated, was questioned, Devlin considered the Morrell case, although six years old, was stronger than that of Mrs Hullett, who had clearly committed suicide and the extent, if any, of Adams' involvement in this was uncertain. Bodkin Adams was tried on the Morrell charge. Devlin considered that the prosecution, although it had not been wrong to bring the case to trial, had not prepared its case adequately as the
Attorney-General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
was a busy minister and the next most senior member of his team
Melford Stevenson Sir Aubrey Melford Steed Stevenson (17 October 1902 – 26 December 1987), usually known as Sir Melford Stevenson, was an English barrister and, later, a High Court judge, whose judicial career was marked by his controversial conduct and ...
did not make up for his leader's absence. The prosecution had not presented a coherent case, particularly on motive, and in his summing up Devlin said that the defence case was a manifestly strong one.Devlin, (1985), pp. 167, 177. In contrast, the defence led by Geoffrey Lawrence Q.C. had, in his view, presented a meticulously prepared and ably argued case. Devlin directed the jury not to find for the prosecution unless they rejected all the defence arguments, and accepted this was a summing up for an acquittal. Adams was then found not guilty on the Morrell charge. Controversially, the prosecutor –
Attorney-General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
, Sir
Reginald Manningham-Buller Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne, (1 August 1905 – 7 September 1980), known as Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, Bt, from 1954 to 1962 and as The Lord Dilhorne from 1962 to 1964, was an English lawyer and Conservative pol ...
 – claimed in Parliament that the acquittal was the result of Devlin's judicial misdirection and even more controversially, he entered a nolle prosequi regarding the Hullett charge. Devlin later termed this "an abuse of process", done because the prosecution's case was deficient, and left Adams under the suspicion that there might have been some truth in talk of mass murder. Devlin received a phone call from the Lord Chief Justice
Lord Goddard William Edgar Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard, (10 April 1877 – 29 May 1971) was Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1946 to 1958, known for his strict sentencing and mostly conservative views despite be ...
at the time defence and prosecution were making their closing speeches. In the event of Adams being acquitted, Goddard suggested that Devlin might consider an application to release Adams on bail before the Hullett trial which was due to start afterwards. Devlin was initially extremely surprised because he had never heard of anyone accused of murder being granted bail, although he considered that Lord Goddard was not deterred by the lack of any precedent. However, he considered that such an application might be justified in the particular circumstances of this case, and invited the Attorney-General and Geoffrey Lawrence to discuss the issue. In 1985, two years after the death of Adams, Devlin wrote an account of the trial, ''Easing the Passing'' – the first such book by a judge in British history. ''Easing the Passing'' provoked a great deal of controversy within the legal profession. Some disapproved of a judge writing about a case he had presided over, while others disliked Devlin's dismissal of Manningham-Buller's approach to the case.
Lord Hailsham Viscount Hailsham, of Hailsham in the County of Sussex, is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1929 for the lawyer and Conservative politician Douglas Hogg, 1st Baron Hailsham, who twice served as Lord High Chancello ...
told judge John Baker: "He ought never to have written it" before adding with a laugh, "But, it's a jolly good read".


Court of Appeal and House of Lords

In 1960, Devlin was made a Lord Justice of Appeal, and the following year, on 11 October, he became a
Law Lord Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, commonly known as Law Lords, were judges appointed under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 to the British House of Lords, as a committee of the House, effectively to exercise the judicial functions of the House o ...
and life peer, as Baron Devlin, ''of West Wick in the
County of Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...
''. He retired in 1964, at the age of 58, having completed the minimum 15 years then necessary to qualify for a full judicial pension. He said that his retirement was due in part to his boredom with the large number of tax cases that came before the House of Lords. He himself explained in an interview: "I was extremely happy as a judge of first instance. I was never happy as an appellate judge ... for the most part, the work was dreary beyond belief. All those revenue cases ..." After retirement, Devlin was a judge on the Administrative Tribunal of the
International Labour Organization The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards. Founded in October 1919 under the League of Nations, it is the first and o ...
until 1986. He was also chairman of the Press Council from 1964 to 1969, and High Steward of Cambridge University from 1966 until 1991. He 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 Guildford () is a town in west Surrey, around southwest of central London. As of the 2011 census, the town has a population of about 77,000 and is the seat of the wider Borough of Guildford, which had around inhabitants in . The name "Guildf ...
and
Maguire Seven Maguire ( , also spelled MacGuire or McGuire) is an Irish surname from the Goidelic languages, Gaelic , which is "son of Odhar" meaning "dun", "dark one". According to legend, this relates to the eleventh descendant of The Three Collas, Colla da ...
cases. He died aged 86 in
Pewsey Pewsey is a large village and civil parish at the centre of the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire, about south of Marlborough and west of London. It is within reach of the M4 motorway and the A303 and is served by Pewsey railway station on the Re ...
, Wiltshire. Lord Devlin received several honorary degrees, including from the universities of
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,
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,
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, Sussex, Leicester,
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, and
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.


Other public activities


Hart–Devlin debate

After the
Wolfenden report The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Sir John Wolfenden, the chairman of the committee) was published in the United Kingdom on 4 September 1957 after a suc ...
in 1957, Devlin argued, initially in his 1959 Maccabean Lecture in Jurisprudence at the
British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spa ...
, in support of
James Fitzjames Stephen Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet, KCSI (3 March 1829 – 11 March 1894) was an English lawyer, judge, writer, and philosopher. One of the most famous critics of John Stuart Mill, Stephen achieved prominence as a philosopher, law ...
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", 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 Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (18 July 190719 December 1992), known simply as H. L. A. Hart, was an English legal philosopher. He was Professor of Jurisprudence (University of Oxford), Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University an ...
supported the report's opposing view (derived from John Stuart Mill) that the law had no business interfering with private acts that harmed nobody. Devlin's argument was expanded in his book ''The Enforcement of Morals'' (1965). As a result of his debate with Devlin on the role of the criminal law in enforcing moral norms, Hart wrote ''Law, Liberty and Morality'' (1963) and ''The Morality of the Criminal Law'' (1965). In the first lecture in "The Enforcement of Morals", Devlin argued that "society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics no society can exist". Violation of the shared morality loosens one of the bonds that hold a society together, and thereby threatens it with disintegration. So an attack on "society's constitutive morality" would threaten society with disintegration. Such acts could therefore not be free from public scrutiny and sanction on the basis that they were purely private acts. He explained: While thus concluding that violations of the "moral code" were the law's business, Devlin observed that this did not mean that society necessarily had the power to intervene. He noted that the chief of the "elastic principles" limiting the power of the State to legislate against immorality was "toleration of the maximum individual freedom that is consistent with the integrity of society". He suggested 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. Privately Devlin felt that antipathy to homosexuality had not reached an intensity of "intolerance, indignation and disgust". In May 1965, he was one of the signatories of a letter to ''
The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...
'' calling for the implementation of the Wolfenden reforms. The American legal philosopher
Joel Feinberg Joel Feinberg (October 19, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan – March 29, 2004 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American political and legal philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political phil ...
stated in 1987 that to a "modern" reader, Devlin's responses to Hart's arguments "seem feeble and perfunctory" and that most readers "will probably conclude that there is no salvaging Devlin's social disintegration thesis, his analogies to political subversion and treason, his conception of the nature of popular morality and how its deliverance is to be ascertained, or the skimpy place he allows to natural moral change". Feinberg does allow that Devlin has an important challenge to liberalism in his formulation of an argument as to why we "treat greater moral blameworthiness ... as an aggravating factor and lesser moral blameworthiness as a mitigating factor in the assignments of punishment". Devlin, for his part, considered (mainly in the last lecture in "The Enforcement of Morals") that the supporters of John Stuart Mill's doctrine had not plausibly fitted into their own theories such violations of the moral code as euthanasia, suicide, a suicide pact, duelling, abortion, incest, cruelty to animals, bigamy, bestiality and other obscenity, committed in private between consenting adults, causing no harm to others.


Devlin Commission

In 1959, soon after the declaration of the state of emergency in Nyasaland, the British Cabinet under Prime Minister Harold Macmillan decided to set up a Commission of Inquiry into the disturbances there and their policing, and appointed Devlin as chairman. Devlin was not Macmillan's choice for chairman, and he later criticised Devlin's appointment, criticising him for having "that
Fenian The word ''Fenian'' () served as an umbrella term for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and their affiliate in the United States, the Fenian Brotherhood, secret political organisations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries dedicated ...
blood that makes Irishmen anti-Government on principle" and for being "bitterly disappointed at my not having made him Lord Chief Justice". He also called him a "
hunchback Kyphosis is an abnormally excessive convex curvature of the spine as it occurs in the thoracic and sacral regions. Abnormal inward concave ''lordotic'' curving of the cervical and lumbar regions of the spine is called lordosis. It can result ...
". In response to an early draft of the commission's report, which was highly critical of repressive police methods, the government hurriedly commissioned the rival
Armitage Report The Armitage Report was a report into the actions of the Nyasaland government in declaring a State of Emergency in March 1959 and actions of the police and troops in the aftermath of that declaration. It was supposed to have been a despatch prepare ...
, which was delivered in July of that year and backed Britain's role there.
Bernard Levin Henry Bernard Levin (19 August 1928 – 7 August 2004) was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by ''The Times'' as "the most famous journalist of his day". The son of a poor Jewish family in London, he won a scholarship t ...
, among others, was of the opinion that: "The Government refused to accept the Devlin Report because it told the truth". Despite Macmillan's's rejection of the Devlin Report, once Iain Macleod became Colonial Secretary later in 1959, he approached Devlin for advice.


Personal life

In 1932, Devlin married Madeleine Hilda Oppenheimer (1909–2012), daughter of the diamonds magnate Sir Bernard Oppenheimer, Bt. Together the couple had six children. Devlin's daughter Clare claimed publicly in evidence to the
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales was an inquiry examining how the country's institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse. It was announced by the British Home Secretar ...
in 2021, when she was 81, that he had sexually abused her from the age of 7 until her teens.


Bibliography

* Devlin, The Hon. Sir Patrick, ''Trial by Jury'', Stevens & Sons, 1956, 1966 * Devlin, Patrick, ''The Enforcement of Morals'', Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965, 1968 * Devlin, Patrick, ''Too Proud to Fight'', 1974 (biography of
Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of ...
) * Devlin, Patrick, ''The Judge'', Oxford University Press, 1979, 1981 * Devlin, Patrick, ''Easing the Passing'', The Bodley Head, 1985


References

Notes Sources * * * *


External links


Review of Devlin's autobiography
by
Alan Watkins Alan Rhun Watkins (3 April 1933 – 8 May 2010) was for over 50 years a British political columnist in various London-based magazines and newspapers. He also wrote about wine and rugby. Life and career Alan Watkins was born in Tycroes, Carmar ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Devlin, Patrick Devlin, Baron 1905 births 1992 deaths Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge English barristers English Roman Catholics English legal writers English people of Irish descent English people of Scottish descent Fellows of the British Academy Knights Bachelor Law lords Members of Gray's Inn Members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom People educated at Stonyhurst College People from Chislehurst Place of death missing Presidents of the Cambridge Union Lords Justices of Appeal Attorneys-General of the Duchy of Cornwall 20th-century King's Counsel Queen's Bench Division judges