Wolfenden Report - Aftermath

Aftermath

The report's recommendations attracted considerable public debate, including a famous exchange of views in publications by Lord Devlin, a leading British judge, whose ideas and publications argued against the report's philosophical basis, and H.L.A. Hart, a leading jurisprudential scholar, who provided argument in its support.

In The Enforcement of Morals, Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin states that the Wolfenden Report "is recognized to be an excellent study of two very difficult legal and social problems". Devlin attacks the principle, derived from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, that the law ought not concern itself with "private immorality", saying that the Report "requires special circumstances to be shown to justify the intervention of the law. I think that this is wrong in principle".

The recommendations eventually led to the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, applying to England and Wales only, that replaced the previous law on sodomy contained in the Offences against the Person Act 1861 and the 1885 Labouchere Amendment which outlawed every homosexual act short of sodomy. The law was only passed a decade after the report was published in 1957.

The historian Patrick Higgins has described a number of flaws with the Report: "its failure to understand or appreciate (except in the most negative terms) the importance of the homosexual subculture".

It later became known that Wolfenden's son Jeremy Wolfenden was gay.

John Wolfenden came 45th in a list of the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes, Pink Paper, 26 September 1997, issue 500, p19.