Jeremy Bentham
English philosopher and legal reformer, a central figure in utilitarianism and codification.
PersonSources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Identity, lifespan 1748–1832 and work as philosopher and legal reformer.
- UCL — Bentham Project
Identity, lifespan 1748–1832 and work as philosopher and legal reformer.
- UCL Archives — Letters to Madison
1811 correspondence concerning codification.
- Wikidata entity identity and cross-references
The entity identity and its recorded authority identifiers; not an independent authority-register validation.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Specific priority for coinages and the date of Truth versus Ashhurst belong to the work records.
- The archive confirms 1811 letters to Madison, but Madison’s response was not inspected.
- VIAF/ROR values were cross-checked against the Wikidata entity; the external authority registry itself was not independently inspected.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Bentham's charge against English law, as the essay presents it, was not that it was wrong but that it was unknowable: law citizens discover only by being punished under it, which he called dog law. His remedy was a complete written restatement, a programme associated with his use of the term codification.
In 1811 he wrote to President Madison offering to perform that restatement for the United States. The UCL archive catalogues those letters; Madison’s response was not inspected in this review.
The essay parts company with him on the common law, which Bentham wanted abolished outright and the essay defends as an emergent system worth keeping.
The dog law passage was traced to Truth versus Ashhurst, written in December 1792. He is depicted in the Pickersgill portrait.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
Sources
Ideas
- Codification
Introduced
- Dog law
Introduced
Images
- Jeremy Bentham, by Henry William Pickersgill
Depicted in
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/people/jeremy-bentham.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25