Jeremy Bentham

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.

[xxxi] more force in the direction of collectivism, with the natural consequence that by 1900 the doctrine of laissez faire, in spite of the large element of truth which it contains, had more or less lost its hold upon the English people.

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.

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;

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

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.

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:

It is only thus that we can assure ourselves in what degree the results of the Austinian analysis tally with facts.

Jeremy Bentham could hardly complain of such language as this:

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

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

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.

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.

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.