| Abstrakt: |
In 1954 the British Government, after centuries in which its criminal law had repressed a multitude of behaviors considered immoral and inappropriate in British society, primarily homosexuality, decided to initiate a public debate to evaluate its possible decriminalization. For this, a special commission was delegated, whose report was the antecedent of one of the most famous juridical-philosophical debates of the last century, the one between Patrick Devlin and Herbert Hart, which, based on the question of the decriminalization of the crime of homosexuality, was aimed at the role and function of criminal law in general and the opportunity of criminal law to impose the dominant social morality. In other words, the two jurists questioned themselves about the rationale behind criminal criminalization, wondering, among other things, whether they should serve the moral authorities of the social majority or, on the contrary, in line with what sustained by nineteenth-century liberal thought, they were autonomous from them and entirely internal to a more strictly legal dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
