Dog law

Bentham's attack on judge-made law: you wait until the thing is done, then beat the subject for it, and the rule exists only in retrospect. His complaint is not that judges decide badly but that a rule which cannot be known before it is broken is not functioning as law at all.

The polemical charge is the reason this is recorded rather than folded into codification. Codification is the remedy he proposed; dog law is the condition he was attacking, in his own words.