Lessons from the Wolfenden Report

The article traces the recent history of homosexual law reform in the UK and the countries of the Commonwealth of Nations, using as its point of departure the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 1957 (‘Wolfenden Report’). In light of the Wolfenden principle – that certain matters of private morality are not the law's business and especially not the proper business of punishment under the criminal law – the article proposes a methodology for law reform in those countries of the Commonwealth that inherited the penal offences but have not yet acted to repeal them.