ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a critical distinction between community values and community attitudes that helps resolve the dilemma such cases pose for the “community values” doctrine. The contention of this article is, therefore, that it is community values and not community attitudes which ought to be the foundation of judicial deliberation about sustaining contemporarily relevant law. A way to solve it is for judges to conduct their deliberation in ways that require them to justify decisions in terms of the law, and in terms of community values when the law is indeterminate or when the common law loses touch with societal change. The purpose of this article is to refine the rationale for recent Australian judicial opinion that appellate courts ought to be responsive to “community values” in exercising their responsibility to keep the law in good repair, by which the judges mean relevant to contemporary Australia.
