Truth versus Ashhurst
Bentham's 1792 reply to Justice Ashhurst, and the source of the dog law passage against judge-made law that citizens cannot know in advance.
Chapter · 1843Sources & confidence: High confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Publication history, UCL transcription and dog-law passage.
- UCL Bentham Project: Truth versus Ashhurst
Written December 1792, first published 1823, Bowring V (1843), pages 231–237, and the dog-law text.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Transcript checked; no examination of the original manuscript or a full textual collation.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
The source of the passage the essay quotes without attribution. As published:
Just as a man makes laws for his dog. When your dog does anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it, and then beat him for it. This is the way you make laws for your dog: and this is the way the judges make law for you and me.
The essay's rendering is accurate to within a colon. The full passage is a little sharper than the quoted fragment, because it supplies the analogy's mechanism: the punishment comes first and the rule is inferred from it.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
People
- Jeremy Bentham
Author
Ideas
- Codification
Subject
- Dog law
Subject · Introduces
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/works/bentham-truth-versus-ashhurst.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25