Dog law
Bentham’s polemical comparison of retrospective judge-made rules to punishing a dog without first announcing the rule.
ConceptSources & confidence: High confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Checked the definition, attribution and stated distinctions against the listed source passages.
- Jeremy Bentham, Truth versus Ashhurst (UCL transcription)
Dog-law passage; written in December 1792 and first published in 1823.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Bentham uses the dog-training comparison in his criticism of common law: people learn the rule through punishment instead of being told it beforehand. The text was written in December 1792 and first published in 1823.
This is his polemical argument about predictability and access to law. It is not a neutral description of every judicial decision or a present-day rule about whether precedent is legally valid.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
Sources
- Truth versus Ashhurst
Introduced in · Discussed in
People
- Jeremy Bentham
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Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/dog-law.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-26