This is a Human rights and English Law (LLB) law question. The question is on the assignment criteria field of this application form below. Thanks for - Essay Example

eport, in effect, recommends for the shift of English law foundations from Victorianesque legal naturalism to a more legal positivist structure more harmonious with a pluralist, multi-cultural society or state. It is part of the on-going effort to keep criminal law out of consenting adults’ sexual behaviour, homosexuality and prostitution as well as individual or private or personal morality while retaining clear functions: “Our formulation of the function of the criminal law so far as it concerns the subject of this inquiry . . .

is to preserve public order and decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious, and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others, particularly those who are specially vulnerable because they are young, weak in body or mind, inexperienced, or in a state of special physical, official or economic dependence. It is not, in our view, the function of the law to intervene in the private lives of citizens, or to seek to enforce any particular patter of behaviour, further than is necessary to carry out the purposes we have outlined.

”3 The committee acknowledged a realm of personal/private morality or immorality within which society and the law should give the individual freedom of choice and action and within which no act of immorality could be a criminal offence unless the same is accompanied by publicly offensive or injurious factors such as corruption, exploitation or public indecency. The committee report sparked the furious Devlin4-Hart5 debate and educated the public of the need for open-mindedness and clarity of reasoning resulting on the clarification of the problems or issues of homosexuality and prostitution, clearly positivist inputs.

What previously has been the undoubted mechanism to enforce social morality, criminal law is being hedged out from private behaviour that does not harm other people; a concept that derived its roots from JS Mill’s harm principle.6 The