Jeremy Bentham

From its pages I first gained an impression, which time and study have deepened, of the immense effect produced by the teaching of Bentham, and also a clear view of the relation between the Blackstonian age of optimism or, to use an expression of Sir Roland Wilson’s, of “stagnation,” and the Benthamite era of scientific law reform.

In regard to interference by law with the liberty of individual citizens, it is probable that a Benthamite Radical, such as John Mill conceived himself to be, differed little from a Whig, such as Macaulay, who certainly did not consciously subscribe to the Benthamite creed, and it is probable that the late Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) would not on this Edition:

In other words, Benthamite liberalism, as interpreted by the rough common sense of intelligent politicians, was, when Mill published his treatise On Liberty, the predominant opinion of the time.

Bentham, in his “Fragment on Government,” and Austin, in his “Province of Jurisprudence Determined,” resolve every law into a command of the lawgiver, an obligation imposed thereby on the citizen, and a sanction threatened in the event of disobedience;

It is the more necessary to note these differences because a student of Bentham would be apt to confound Fictions, Equity, and Statute law under the single head of legislation.

We must, therefore, not suffer ourselves to be affected by the ridicule which Bentham pours on legal fictions wherever he meets them.

Bentham seems to me from several expressions to have supposed that if the English Law of Evidence were re-constructed on his principles questions of fact would cease to present any serious difficulty.

We come, in the Corus Bescna, upon the following attempt at classification, which I fear would have deeply shocked Jeremy Bentham and John Austin:

The second advantage I believe to consist in the growing familiarity of Englishmen with the investigations of the so-called Analytical Jurists, of whom the most considerable are Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.

Jeremy Bentham could hardly complain of such language as this:

Among the many proposals which have been made for reforming it since Bentham became an authority among us, one frequently put forward may be described as a proposal to carry to its farthest consequences the early process of change in which feudalism begun.

The tendency of German juridical opinion, which I have mentioned, shows that we are in danger of overestimating the stability of legal conceptions.

the adjective code, to use Bentham’s phraseology, as opposed to the substantive code.

In the case in question, the writer of this has been assured,—and from authority, which he has peculiar reasong for relying upon,—that the expense of merely putting in an answer by one of the Defendants to a bill in Equity, amounted to the above sum of 800l.

I happened once to fall into conversation with a man, who, from an Attorney had been made Judge of one of the provinces in America.

Such a society might claim to justify its name of anarchist in so far as it knew nothing of a formal court or of those ‘names of office’ which Bentham considered the most decisive mark of established government.